4th. The Indo-Germanic people have left monuments of their sinewy energy in the psycho-physical characteristics of affiliated races and tongues, and individual family likenesses may be readily traced between groups of thinkers and dreamers on the banks of the Ganges, in the Academy, and at Weimar. Again the mystical semitic world, groaning beneath the weight of an overwrought ideal, and lacking the ballast of science and patient thought, has ever and anon given birth to prodigies and monsters of cabalistic or Gnostic extravagance.
5th. To follow the currents of peoples and tongues, the great subdivisions of the Teutonic and Romance tribes and literatures, their virtues and vices have stamped its present physical and moral character on the face of modern Europe. The Teutonic, representing strength and depth in word and work, has been the stronghold of emancipation in life and thought, yet tinctured with the savageness and chaos of unpolished and disordered nature. The Romance, fettered by the rhythm of Latinity, has yet possessed that voluptuous wealth of the ideal and that graceful tracery of thought and wit which have been denied to the other. The antagonism of the Catholic and Protestant mind is the result of this contrast, which has, moreover, been pictured in the tertian fevers of French revolution and in the mystical skepticism of modern Germany.
As certain races, so also certain families of writers, have in thought transcended the bounds of the existing and actual, and thrown out from their brain an ideal past, present, or future, beyond the horizon, and free from the flaws of their experience. Thus, whilst the followers of Tao-tse were in China seeking for the drug of immortality, the Greek and Roman poets and historians were dreaming of a golden age that cast its radiance over the past, or of that fabled Atlantis and those sweet Islands of the Blest in the far west—dreams and fables that have been somewhat justified by modern discovery. Again sacred voices mingled with these aspirations, and the semitic bards and seers pronounced in their oracles an Eden for the past and a millenium for the future of man.
Nor were these views confined to the old world, for the followers of Columbus found, among the cannibals of the gulf, the traditions of a fountain of eternal youth, and later travellers were regaled with gorgeous stories of El Dorado and his empire—traditions and stories that seemed to point, however obscurely, to the Sitzbath and Californian riches.
There has likewise been a class of writers broad-cast through the nations who have sought to mend the present and make the future by holding the mirror to contemporaneous deformity, or painting the perspective of an earthly elysium with the rainbow tints of hope. Negatively or positively, directly or indirectly, these men had, in common, faith in the regeneration of humanity. Utopias are the familiar homes of such minds, either because they have a cast in their eyes, or because they are more clairvoyants than the vulgar herd. In the spring-time of our race, a Plato reflected on the poetical extravagancies of his day, and refracted the rays of golden fancy in the enchanted land of his Republic. The Hebrew seers in like manner, whilst they apply no measured castigations to the money-changers who converted the temple of God into a den of thieves, love to soar in sublimest rhapsody above the valley of dry bones and the shadow of death cast around them, and to indulge in visions of a vernal future, when earth should smile in the sunshine of infinite love, when the wolf should dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid, and a little child should lead them. Affiliated members of this extensive and venerable company of cynics and seers have ever and anon in the current of ages lifted a frowning brow above the troubled waters round about them, and with the same breath that swept like a tempest over the wintry waste, their cradle and their home, have given utterance to strains of harmony that told of summer skies to come. Tracing the tides of the children of men in their eccentric ebbings and floodings, a little crew of rovers may be ever seen ploughing the world of waters, true to their principle of keeping aloof from the gulf-stream. Europe has been the chief nursery of these rovers, whose voices, though few and far between, have risen above the storms of evil passions howling about them, and have echoed through the ages. Thus a Rabelais could laugh the knell of monkery, and with his stentor voice, rich booming from the classic world of Nature, that had slept during the dark ages, could crack the babel of spiritual usurpation, and restore the balance of power between the seen and the unseen. A Cervantes in like manner could, in the fulness of time, inflict death-wounds with a stroke of his pen on a superannuated chivalry, and thus, by negatively giving a coup de grâce to the past, pave the way for an age of prose. Later in the day a Swift appears, in the heart of a rotten age, himself infected with the leprosy, yet he smites the idols of his time, of Stuart progeny, Lust and Lucre, and converts his fables into a house of correction for a nation's vices. The Tale of a Tub contains a stream of lustral water, and Gulliver is no mean adept at the photographic art. The Dean hath taught us how the "positive" fictions of a madman's brain may indirectly be a school to the nations at all times and in all seasons.
Poesy has mixed its plaintive strains in the lamentations and oracles of insane or inspired reformers, and the aberration or illumination of a kindred spirit breaks forth in the wizard words of a prophet or a bard. Some favored scions of the royal priesthood and chosen generation of whom we speak seem to mingle these various and heterogeneous ingredients, the cynic's lash with the seer's lamp, mathematical squares and compasses with the conjurations of the diviner. Their proportions, both harmonious and deformed, bespeak their consanguinity with an extensive family, whose branches are scattered through broad lands, and are not confined to a single variety of the human race, though the quality and quantity of their esprit de corps may be especially predicated of the Caucasian race.
There are sovereign natures that bespeak the choice blood of rival and remote races mingling in their veins, and which may claim kinsmanship in opposite and conflicting clans of teachers. We have Indo-Germanic minds, whose massive substance is relieved by the arabesque of the Semitic style of thought, and which, though stamped with the characteristic mould of their parentage, fling aside much of its speciality, and stand forth as magnates in the universal aristocracy of humanity.
An example of a rich nature cast in this mould has been presented of late years in France, in the person of Charles Fourier. Though indelibly French, he is still more human, and though Teutonic elements enter largely as component parts of his frame, and the Romance genius has cast its sunshine tints over his canvas, yet has he bravely shaken off the chains of generic and specific modes of thought and sight, and the priestly hieroglyphs and geometry of Egypt are seen to blend with Persian dualism and the prophetic wand of Hebrew seers in his pages. Nay, the mantle of Mohammed might seem to have fallen on his capacious shoulders, to judge from the strangely glorious flights of his fancy, and the tangible solids of his elysium. Thus the nations would appear to have converged towards and centred in this brain, and to have dropped in their pearls or their paste, as the case might be. Exaggerating the mathematical precision of French thought, it is yet tempered in a manner somewhat uncommon, by the most wholesale picture-writing on which man ever yet ventured. The flaming double-edged critic's sword is sometimes changed in his hands, after a manner wonderful to relate, into an Esculapian staff, which farther suffers a frequent conversion into Mercurian caduceus and Bacchanile Thyrsus, and at another time assumes the proportions of Midas's wand. Never was such a many-faced Janus seen in the flesh as this man, who exceeds Proteus and Hindoo avatars in multiplicity combined with unity.
The bitter laugh still curls our lips, elicited by his merciless satire, when the tears of pity come coursing down our cheeks, as he touches with magic finger the most godlike fibres of the soul. Luxuriance, bordering on levity, follows fast a sense of justice and of truth, that might have put a Brutus and an Aristides to the blush. National contrasts, harmonies, and deformities, all seem reflected in this representative man.
Yet it would be a very partial view that represented Fourier as nothing better than an expletive particle added to the genealogical list of idea-mongers, or a mosaic of valuable relics in earth's cabinet of curiosities. Though his pen inflicts wounds both broad and deep, yet a balm is ever at hand. Not satisfied with performing amputations for the good of the body corporate, he is a professor of the healing art, and affects to have discovered an elixir that shall wipe away all tears, by causing pain and sorrow to flee away. I do not profess to judge of the merits of the case, but one feature distinguishes Fourier from critics, reformers, and prophets, who are gathered to their fathers. He is a scientific explorer, and the plans that he has designed for the future structure of humanity, from the high order of architecture and mechanics which they exhibit, discriminate him from the vulgar herd as an originator, and place him in the category either of eminent scientific adventurers or inventors. Daring and caution shake hands at every page, and seem exhausted by his pen. The Archimedian lever found a resting-place in his brain, and sundry of his thoughts seem not inapt to upheave the world.