Now, if we do not greatly mistake, the lesson which this country should learn from the mortifying experience of the English army in the Crimea is not one of exultation over its lamentable and unnecessary errors, but rather of indifference to the insulting criticism of a nation which can so ill afford to be critical, and of determination to profit in every possible way by those blunders which might have been avoided. The history of all wars, moreover, should teach us that now and then there comes a time when to hold the olive-branch in one hand and the sword in the other, especially if the olive-branch is kept in the foreground and the sword in the background, involves not only a sad waste of energy, but is mistaken kindness to our enemies.
Those who have read—and who has not?—the charming story of "Rab and his Friends" will remember the incident which, for the sake of brevity, we reluctantly condense. A small, thorough-bred terrier, after being rudely interrupted in his encounter with a large shepherd's-dog, darts off, fatally bent on mischief, to seek a new canine antagonist. He discovers him in the person of a huge mastiff, quietly sauntering along in a peaceful frame of mind, all unsuspicious of danger. The angry terrier makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. The rest of the story shall be told in the graphic language of the author. "To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar,—yes, roar: a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? He is muzzled! The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breeching. His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage,—a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, 'Did you ever see the like of this?' He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. We soon had a crowd; the chicken held on. 'A knife!' cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then!—one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,—and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead."
If we draw a useful moral from this homely incident, it will not be the first time that the unerring sagacity of animals has been serviceable to man. A stealthy, cunning, unscrupulous, desperate, devilish foe has seized the nation by the throat and threatens its life. The Government is strong, courageous, determined, abundantly able to make a successful resistance, and even to kill the insolent enemy; but—it is muzzled: muzzled here by conservative counsels, and there by radical complaints,—by the over-cautious policy of one general, and the headlong haste of another,—by a too tender regard for slavery in some States, and by a too zealous anxiety for instant emancipation in others,—by fear of provoking opposition in one quarter, and by a blind defiance of all obstacles in another. Now what shall be done? Shall we hesitate, despond, despair? Never! For Heaven's sake, take off the muzzle. Use every weapon which the God of Battles has placed in our hands. Put forth all the power of the nation. Encourage and promote all fighting generals; cashier all officers who are determined to make war on peace principles; arm, equip, and discipline negroes, not to burn, plunder, and massacre, but to meet their and our enemies in fair and open fight.[B] Demonstrate to the world that we are terribly in earnest. Waste no time in discussing the chance of foreign intervention. Postpone Pacific railroads, international telegraphs, polygamy in Utah, African colonization, everything, to the engrossing and emergent crisis which now confronts the Government. Make the contest sharp, short, and decisive. Put down the Rebellion, vindicate the majesty of the Law, the sacredness of the Union, and the integrity of the Constitution. There will be time enough, after this is done, to discuss all minor questions and all collateral issues. One paramount duty lies directly before us. Let us perform this duty fearlessly, and leave the future with God.
[Footnote B: The opposition to the employment of negro regiments, if made by traitors North or South, can be easily comprehended,—if made by loyal men, is wholly inexplicable. Your neighbor's house takes fire at night. The flames, long smouldering, make rapid progress, and threaten the comfort, certainly, if not the lives of his household, and the total destruction of his property. The alarm is given. An engine comes promptly to the rescue. It is just in season to save his dwelling. The firemen spring with ready alacrity to their places. But stop! He suddenly discovers the appalling fact that they are negroes! True, there is not a moment to be lost. No other engine is, or can be, within helping distance. The least delay means poverty and a houseless family. And yet he rudely dismisses the dusky firemen, folds his arms with Spartan stoicism, and, looking complacently on the burning building, says, "Better this than to rely on the assistance of niggers!" Is it Spartan stoicism? Is it not rather stark lunacy? And would you not take immediate measures to provide such a man with permanent quarters in a mad-house?]
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Roba di Roma. By WILLIAM W. STORY. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 355, 369. London: Chapman & Hall. 1863.
The father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild was in the habit of saying, that "travelling was travelling in one part of the world as well as another; it consisted in being such a time from home, and in traversing so many leagues; and he appealed to experience whether most of our travellers in France and Italy did not prove at their return that they might have been sent as profitably to Norway and Greenland." Fielding himself, the author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows; but we think he told no more than the truth in regard to the far greater part of those idle people who powder themselves with dust from the highways and blur their memories with a whirl through the galleries of Europe. They go out empty, to come home unprofitably full. They go abroad to escape themselves, and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the attempt to jump away from their own shadows. And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly about it, might bring home something worth having from the dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sentimentalizing in the "Tristia," had left behind him a treatise on the language of the Getae which he learned, we should have thanked him for something more truly valuable than all his poems. Could men only learn how comfortably the world can get along without the various information which they bring home about themselves! Honest observation and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of the rarest of human things, so much more easily are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper is fine writing than exactness. Let any one who has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts with regard to the battles of our civil war only consider how much more he has learned concerning the splendid emotions of the reporter than the events of the fight, (unless he has had the good luck of a peep into the correspondence of some pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done by two kinds of men only,—those of the highest genius and culture, and those wholly without either.
It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest things can be done with ease only by the very fewest people, and those specially endowed to that end. The English language, for instance, can show but one sincere diarist, Pepys; and yet it would seem a simple matter enough to jot down the events of every day for one's self without thinking of Mrs. Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting precisely those who pay most assiduous court to her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell what you have seen should be tolerably easy; but in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does not the tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he ought to have experienced, instead of letting us know what he saw and felt? If authors would only consider that the way to write an enlivening book is not by seeing and saying just what would be expected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public would be gainers. What tortures have we not seen the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to get up the appropriate emotion before some famous work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to escape! If one does not like the Venus of Milo, let him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never will.
Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from travelling-companions whose only notion of their function was that of putting so many leagues a day behind them. His theory was that of Ulysses, who was not content with seeing the cities of many men, but would learn their minds also. And this way of taking time enough, while we think it the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a country so much the reverse of fast as Italy, where impressions need to steep themselves in the sun and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem should be translated take your own time. But is there any particular reason why everybody should go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell everybody else what he supposes he ought to have seen there? Surely, there must be some adequate cause for so constant an effect.
Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that, if he could only see Rome, "it would give him talk for a lifetime." The utmost stretch of his longing is to pass "four months on classic ground," after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti conciva satur,—a condition in which we fear the poor fellow returned thither only too often, though unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not so much by its association with great events as with great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he had an invincible predilection. But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature. The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome; the Englishman, because the same Providence that hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to furnish prey to the courier also, and because his money will make him a Milor in partibus. But to the American, especially if he be of an imaginative temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other foreigner. In England he is a poor relation whose right in the entail of home traditions has been docked by revolution; of France his notions are purely English, and he can scarce help feeling something like contempt for a people who habitually conceal their meaning in French; but Rome is the mother-country of every boy who has devoured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Florus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility. For him who has escaped thither there is no longer any tyranny of public opinion; its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches that consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the recovery of his own individuality. He is no longer met at every turn with "Under which king, bezonian? Speak, or die!" He is not forced to take one side or the other about table-tipping, or the merits of General Blank, or the constitutionality of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need not hide his natural self in the livery of any opinion, and may be as happy as Adam, if he be wise enough to keep clear of the apple of High Art. This may be very weak, but it is also very agreeable to certain temperaments; and to be weak is to be miserable only where it is a duty to be strong.