The inventor of the leg has not been contented to stop there. He has worked for years upon the construction of an artificial arm, and has at length succeeded in arranging a mechanism, which, if it cannot serve a pianist or violinist, is yet equal to holding the reins in driving, receiving fees for professional services, and similar easy labors. Where Mr. Palmer means to stop in supplying bodily losses it would be premature to say. We suppose the accidents happening occasionally from the use of the guillotine are beyond his skill, and spare our readers the lively remark suggested by the contrary hypothesis.
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It is one of the signs of our advancing American civilization, that the arts which preserve and restore the personal advantages necessary or favorable to cultivated social life should have reached such perfection among us. American dentists have achieved a reputation which has sent them into the palaces of Europe to open the mouths of sovereigns and princes as freely as the jockeys look into those of horses and colts. Bad teeth, too common among us, help to breed good dentists, no doubt; but besides this there is an absolute demand for a certain comeliness of person throughout all the decent classes of our society. It is the same standard of propriety in appearances which lays us open to the reproach of caring too much for dress. If the national ear for music is not so acute as that of some other peoples, the national eye for the harmonies of form and color is better than we often find in older communities. We have a right to claim that our sculptors and painters prove so much as this for us. American taste was offended, outraged, by the odious "peg" which the Old-World soldier or beggar was proud to show. We owe the well-shaped, intelligent, docile limb, the half-reasoning willow of Mr. Palmer, to the same sense of beauty and fitness which moulded the soft outlines of the Indian Girl and the White Captive in the studio of his namesake at Albany.
As we wean ourselves from the Old World, and become more and more nationalized in our great struggle for existence as a free people, we shall carry this aptness for the production of beautiful forms more and more into common life, which demands first what is necessary and then what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils. The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized Milesian shall be a thing of beauty as well as a joy forever. We are already pushing the plastic arts farther than many persons have suspected. There is a small town not far from us where a million dollars' worth of gold is annually beaten into ornaments for the breasts, the fingers, the ears, the necks of women. Many a lady supposes she is buying Parisian adornments, when Attleborough could say to her proudly, like Cornelia, "These are my jewels." The workmen of this little town not only meet the tastes of the less fastidious classes, to whom all that glisters is gold, but they shape the purest metal into artistic and effective patterns. When the Koh-i-noor—the Mountain of Light—was to be fashioned, it was found to be almost as formidable a task as that of Xerxes, when he undertook to hew Mount Athos to the shape of man. The great crystal was sent to Holland, as the only place where it could be properly cut. We have lately seen a brilliant which, if not a mountain of light, was yet a very respectable mound of radiance, valued at some ten or twelve thousand dollars, cut in this virgin settlement, and exposed in one of our shop-windows to tempt our frugal villagers.
Monsieur Trousseau, Professor in the Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a Choctaw chief would be ashamed to wear one of her bonnets.
Listen, O Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth's many-chimneyed towns! America has made implements of husbandry which out-mow and out-reap the world. She has contrived man-slaying engines which kill people faster than any others. She has modelled the wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas. She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat. She has revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the elephantine backs of the waves. She has invented the sewing-machine to save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial toil, so that Fifine and Frétillon may have more leisure for self-development. She has taught you a whole new system of labor in her machinery for making watches and rifles. She has bestowed upon you and all the world an anodyne which enables you to cut arms and legs off without hurting the patient; and when his leg is off, she has given you a true artist's limb for your cripple to walk upon, instead of the peg on which he has stumped from the days of Guy de Chauliac to those of M. Nelaton. She has been contriving well-shaped boots and shoes for the very people who, if they were your countrymen, would be clumping about in wooden sabots. In works of scientific industry, hardly to be looked for among so new a people she has distanced your best artificers. The microscopes made at Canastota, in the backwoods of New York, look in vain for their rivals in Paris, and must challenge the best workmanship of London before they can be approached in excellence. The great eye that stares into the celestial spaces from its workshop in Cambridge, dives deeper through their clouds of silvery dust than any instrument mounted in your observatory in face of the Luxembourg. Our artisans produce no Gobelin tapestries or Sèvres porcelain as yet; but when your mobs have looted the Tuileries, our shopkeepers have bought up enough specimens to serve them as patterns by-and-by.
All this is something for a nation which has hardly pulled up the stumps out of its city market-places. It is sad to reflect that milliners, like Burgundy, are spoiled by transportation to the headquarters of American fashion. But as the best bonnet of the Empress's own artist would be exploded with yells a couple of seasons after the time when it was the rage, the Icarian professor's flight into the regions of rhetoric has not led him to any very logical resting-place from which he can look down on the aesthetic possibilities of New York or other Western cities emerging from the semi-barbarous state.
We are not proud, of course, of any of the mechanical triumphs we have won; they are well enough, and show—to borrow the words of a distinguished American, whom, during his too brief career, we held unrivalled by any experimenter in the Old World for the depth as well as the daring of his investigations—that some things can be done as well as others.
Our specialty is of somewhat larger scope. We profess to make men and women out of human beings better than any of the joint-stock companies called dynasties have done or can do it. We profess to make citizens out of men,—not citoyens, but persons educated to question all privileges asserted by others, and claim all rights belonging to themselves,—the only way in which the infinitely most important party to the compact between the governed and governing can avoid being cheated out of the best rights inherent in human nature, as an experience the world has seen almost enough of has proved. We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary melanosis, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it. When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the materies morbi,—and both these events are only matters of time,—perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners. If not, there will probably be refugees enough from the Old World, who have learned the fashions in courts, and will be glad to turn their knowledge to a profitable use for the benefit of their republican patronesses in New York and Boston.
We have run away from our subject farther than we intended at starting; but an essay on legs could hardly avoid the rambling tendency which naturally belongs to these organs.