The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 71, No. 439, May, 1852
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 71, No. 439, May, 1852
Author: Various
Release date: January 31, 2024 [eBook #72838]
Language: English
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Jonathan Ingram, Brendan OConnor, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 71, NO. 439, MAY, 1852 ***
BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. DLXXI. MAY 1863. VOL. XCIII.
CONTENTS.
WILSON’S PREHISTORIC MAN, 525
CAXTONIANA.—PART XVI., 545
NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF
IMAGINATION.
THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART., 561
ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE, 576
LUDWIG UHLAND, 586
MY INVESTMENT IN THE FAR WEST, 595
THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN
PAINTINGS, 613
AMERICAN STATE PAPERS, 628
THE BUDGET, 645
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET.
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
NO. DLXXI. MAY 1863. VOL. XCIII.
WILSON’S PREHISTORIC MAN.[1]
The title of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in Mr Wilson’s book applies not only to
those races who lived and expired before any history whatever was
written, but to all races, even those who are contemporary with us, who
are incapable of delivering a history of themselves to other nations or
their own posterity. They are rather the _un_-historic, the speechless
people—speechless so far as their posterity is concerned, on whom his
inquiries are directed. In fact, that portion of the development of
mankind which pertains to savage life, or to the very earliest stages of
civilisation, is the subject of Mr Wilson’s book. The subject is far
from being new, but far from being exhausted; and our author’s
archæological knowledge has enabled him to invest it with a novel
interest. His position is somewhat singular in its advantages. A
European archæologist and antiquarian, he finds himself in that new
world where forms of human life are still lingering akin to those which
he has been hitherto studying by the light only of such remains as have
been preserved for ages buried in the earth. His _stone_, his _bronze_,
his _iron_ periods are all found living about him. The flint weapon dug
up in London or Glasgow from the lowest strata of human remains, has, in
this new world, hardly fallen from the hand of the native. The men of
the _stone period_ are still alive, though half a century more may see
them either absorbed in the more civilised races, or altogether
extinguished.
This combination of the knowledge of the antiquarian with the
observations of the traveller has a singular charm for us: but there is
another combination which is still more attractive; it is where the
philosophical historian, familiar with the myths of antiquity, traces in
the living barbarians around him the same play of fancy, or the same
curious development of thought, that he has been accustomed to study in
the obscure records of a dead language. Mr Wilson is an historian as
well as an archæologist, and is in both capacities an enlightened
student of such _living antiquity_ as may still exist in that continent,
where the earliest and the latest forms of civilisation were destined to
meet and to recognise each other.
Our author might, we think, have put his materials together in a more
compact form, and arranged them more carefully. The headings of the
several chapters lead us to expect a more definite arrangement than we
find in the book itself: and this must be partly our excuse if our own
observations should seem to be of a miscellaneous character. It must be
confessed, also, that there is sometimes a want of precision and
accuracy of language on just those occasions where precision is most
needed, and that this is not compensated by a rather too lavish display
of a florid species of eloquence, better fitted for the lecture-room
than the written composition. It is good of its kind, but there is too
much of it. We presume that a large portion of the book was written
originally for the lecture-room. But notwithstanding these minor
defects, we confidently recommend these volumes as replete with
information on a variety of interesting topics, and suggestive of many
trains of reflection. They will assuredly repay an attentive perusal.
Mr Wilson commences with a glance at that problem of the “antiquity of
man” which Sir Charles Lyell has still more lately and more fully
treated. Perhaps, if he had written after the publication of Sir Charles
Lyell’s work, he would have expressed himself with more distinctness on
the subject; yet he seems substantially to have arrived at whatever safe
conclusions the evidence hitherto collected enables us to rest in. He
has said all that can really be said at present on the matter. He
observes that “the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the
initial chapters of archæology and ethnology.” It is plain that man
could not make his appearance upon the earth till the earth was fitted
for his habitation; and it is a reasonable conjecture that it would not
long be so prepared for him before, in some part of the world, he made
his appearance. Mr Wilson is not disposed to be incredulous as “to the
traces of fossil human bones mingling with those of the extinct mammals
of the drift;” but we gather from his work that he would be slow to rest
his belief on the great antiquity of man solely on the discovery of such
flint implements as have been dug out of the valley of the Somme and
elsewhere. We think that, notwithstanding the confidence of certain
_experts_ who have pronounced that these flints have received their form
from the hand of man, there is a well-founded suspicion that, after all,
they may have been broken into their present shape by natural or
physical forces. They are not ground to a point, it must be remembered,
nor sharpened to an edge, only chipped into a wedge-like form. When we
read of great numbers of these flints being discovered in a certain
spot, and that a _selection_ is made of such as seem to have been
chipped by the hand of man, _and that this selection is a matter of
acknowledged difficulty_, we may be excused for suspending our judgment
as to the fact whether any one of them was ever the tool or implement of
a human being. We may be excused if, in the present state of the
evidence, we require that this testimony of the flints be _confirmed_ by
other testimony,—by the presence of human bones, or of indisputable
works of human art in the same post-pliocene formation.[2] We do not
presumptuously reject their evidence altogether; we do not take it upon
ourselves to say that not one of the stones collected from the valley of
the Somme has been fashioned by man; we have little trust in our own
judgment upon such a matter; but it is not evidence which can _stand
alone_. This Sir Charles Lyell admits himself, though in some passages
of his work he seems to forget his own admission. But such antiquity as
we can assign to man on other evidence—by the discovery in certain
positions of human remains or indisputable relics of human art—is very
great, and sufficient for all the purposes of the ethnologist. The
elaborate, and, to the geologist, highly interesting work of Sir Charles
Lyell demands a separate and careful examination; we here merely content
ourselves with remarking that the _very_ great antiquity of man—that
which would compel us to believe that he existed for some almost
immeasurable period in the condition of the savage—rests hitherto on
unsatisfactory grounds.
The ethnologist who believes, as Mr Wilson does, in the unity of the
human race, requires a long period of time for the development of those
varieties which had become permanent prior to the epoch of the building
of the Egyptian Pyramids. Mr Wilson takes what he requires, but does
not, as matters stand at present, contest for more. To those who, on the
grounds of the sacred text, would dispute his right to even this modest
inroad upon the illimitable Past, he answers,—that the chronology
popularly supposed to be that of the Bible is in fact the chronology
only of certain learned interpreters, and that there is nothing in the
sacred text to exclude the supposition that a much longer interval may
have passed than is generally supposed between the creation of Adam and,
let us say, the appearance of Abraham. Interpreting the Noachian Deluge
as partial—as not, in the literal sense of the term, universal—he finds
scope enough within the limits of the sacred text for that slow and
gradual development of civilised man which his archæology has taught him
to believe in. Nor does he find any difficulty whatever in reconciling
this slow progress from the savage to the civilised man with what is
recorded of the creation of Adam, or the attributes of our first
parents. Their superior excellence, he considers, consisted in their
perfect morality, in the predominance of the benevolent affections, and
in that reason which is one with self-knowledge: it could not have
consisted, he argues, in knowledge of the arts and sciences; certainly
not in the knowledge of arts quite needless in the warmth, abundance,
and security of the garden of Paradise. When, therefore, their
descendants, deprived of this high moral excellence, found themselves
scattered abroad upon the earth, what could they, in fact, have become
but ignorant savages? They would have to evolve from their own natural
sagacity those arts of life which their new relation to the external
world rendered necessary. They would have to commence that long and
toilsome ascent to civilisation which the speculative historian has so
often attempted to describe.
We feel persuaded that our author would be unwilling that, in any notice
of his work, these explanations should be omitted, and therefore it is
that we give them here so prominent a place. For ourselves, so confident
are we that scientific truth and religious truth will be found in the
end to be inextricably combined, and to be reciprocally sustaining each
other, that we are not very solicitous to patch up hasty and perhaps
needless reconciliations. At present we have to settle our science; when
this is done, it will be time to ask ourselves _what_ it is that needs
reconcilement.
Although the archæologist can point with triumph to the evidence of
successive tombs, or cromlechs, as proving the sequence of his three
ages of stone and bronze and iron, he can nowhere carry us back _to the
first stone period_, and from this to the first development of the
_bronze_ and the _iron_. He can show us that on a certain spot—say the
soil on which London stands—there have been generations of men
distinguished by the kind of tools they had framed for themselves. But
it is the history of men _on that spot_ which his materials enable him
to write; they do not enable him to write the history of _the progress
of man_ from his earliest condition of existence. For the first men who
lived on the banks of the Thames had come, we presume, from other
countries; they had had a history, and were the products of some kind of
human society before they settled there; and the generations that
followed might have received their arts, as in one case we know they
did, from foreign nations. It is, after all, therefore, from _a priori_
speculation—from what we infer must have been the course of things—that
we describe mankind as proceeding from the rudest modes of existence to
the more civilised. The testimony which the archæologist appeals to
confirms these speculations; it can do no more. It never brings us to
the real history of human art. We have still to guess how men lived at
first, whether on the fruits of the earth or by the chase; we have still
to guess how men discovered the use of fire, how they elaborated mere
vocal signs into a grammatical language; we have still to conjecture
when or where the first canoe or the first house was built. We make this
remark not to detract from the labours of the archæologist, but simply
to put the subject on its right basis. We have nowhere that kind of
evidence which takes us back to the first developments of the human
intellect; the nature of these must still be matter of inference. We
still argue, to a great extent, in a purely speculative manner; we
conclude that a progress like that which history and historical
monuments enable us to trace, was the kind of progress which the first
families of the earth passed through; but we know nothing historically
of that early progress.
In the old European or Asiatic continent we had been accustomed to
regard the earliest generations of mankind as entirely lost in the mists
of antiquity; but, till lately, we looked on the continent of America as
being, in respect of its population, far more recent, and as affording a
more simple subject for ethnological speculation. The civilisation of
Mexico and Peru, destroyed by the Spaniards, was traced to Egypt, or to
some other portion of the Old World. The vagrant tribes of savages that
lived upon the chase were the still more degenerate children of Europe.
But this new continent is now found to have been the habitation of man
at so remote a period, that the civilisations of Mexico and Peru,
however they originated (and they were probably native), must rank
amongst its modern events. Ruins of more ancient cities are found buried
in its forest, and monuments of some forgotten worship are traced upon
the banks of its rivers. The remains of man himself—parts of the human
skeleton—have been found in positions which suggest an antiquity far
beyond that of the cities of the Nile or the Euphrates. Some of these
cases are well known, and well known on account of the disputes and
discussions they have given occasion to; others, from which
(geologically speaking) only a modest antiquity has been inferred, seem
to our author to be worthy of credit. He says:—
“In the post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the
bed of the Ashley River, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and
other gigantic extinct mammals, occur, not only associated with
existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also
apparently with others hitherto believed to have been domesticated and
introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But, still
more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the
contemporaneous existence of some of those strange extinct mammals
with man, are notices of the remains of human art in the same
formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils
from the post-pliocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural
Science at Philadelphia, remarked:—‘Dr Klipstein, who resides near
Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large
swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the
request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were
indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in
the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a small party
of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in
obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one
entire tusk; and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the
fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to
that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians.’
“It would not be wise,” continues Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories
on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely
separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course
through the eocene and post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, and
where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from
their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous
and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of
Dr Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically
speaking, a comparatively recent formation.”
After alluding to the magnificent skeleton of the _Mastodon Ohioticus_
which is now in the British Museum, and in companionship with which an
Indian flint arrow-head was found, he adds:—
“Another remarkable account, preserved in the ‘American Journal of
Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon, with considerable
portions of the skin, found in Missouri, associated with stone
spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the
idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death,
and partially consumed by fire. Such contiguity of the works of man
with those extinct diluvial giants warns us at least to be upon our
guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of man’s
ancient presence in the New World as well as the Old. If the evidence
is inconsequential or untruthful, future discoveries will not fail to
bring it to nought; if, on the contrary, it involves glimpses of an
unseen truth, no organised scepticism will prevent the ultimate
disclosure of its amplest revelations.”
Had man, during the whole of this early prehistoric epoch, whatever its
duration may have been, lived like the savage, in what we call the
_stone period_? Or had the use of metals and other arts been discovered
and lost again—lost, perhaps, because human societies had not attained
that coherence and stability necessary to the preservation of the arts?
However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the use of the metal tool
forms an important era in the progress of civilisation. And Mr Wilson
mentions a fact which enables us to understand very readily the
transition from the use of stone to the use of metal. Copper is still
found in the New World, and probably was at first found in the Old
World, in a pure state—in _nuggets_, as an Australian gold-digger would
call them—and these could at once be beaten into the shape of an axe by
stone hammers without the application of fire. The fragment of copper
was to the Indian a new kind of stone, which had the fortunate property
of malleability.
“In the veins of the copper region of Lake Superior, the native metal
occurs in enormous masses weighing hundreds of tons; and many loose
blocks of considerable size have been found on the lake shore, or
lying detached on the surface, besides smaller pieces exposed on and
mingled with the superficial soil in sufficient quantities to supply
all the wants of the nomade hunter. This, accordingly, he wrought into
chisels and axes, armlets and personal ornaments of various kinds,
without the use of the crucible and any knowledge of metallurgic arts;
and, indeed, without recognising any precise distinction between the
copper which he mechanically separated from the mass, and the
unmalleable stone or flint out of which he had been accustomed to
fashion his spear and arrow heads.”
Whilst applauding the metal tool, copper or iron, and acknowledging what
we owe to it, let us not pass over the _stone_—that handful of rock or
flint by the aid of which the metal, in the first instance, was wrought
and fashioned—without its meed of gratitude. It seems a slight
unnoticeable fact that there should be these manageable fragments of
hard substance ready to the hand of man; that the whole earth was not
divided between the bed of rock and the bed of sand or clay; that there
should have been there mere stones (mere litter, you would say), of
which the floor of the earth had better have been swept clean. Yet those
nodules of flint formed slowly in the chalk—yet those rolled stones upon
the deserted beach, that the sea has fashioned for the human palm, and
left high and dry upon the land—seem to have entered as much into the
_preparation_ for man as the _fauna_ or the _flora_ amongst which he was
to live.
Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the
clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No
one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well
worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the
rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it.
This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very
widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth
amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to
manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be
some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall
be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose
with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by
this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians
drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they
collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal,
and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be
more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity
that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they
are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The
savage is not accustomed only to _thank_ God; he has, he thinks, to
propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to _give_, he _destroys_ in
honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is
tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice.
Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest
seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a
progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried
fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in
the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed
to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint
hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and
converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones,
when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as
from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit
fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it
devour.”
Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The
Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime
Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so
on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after
fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to
hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds
their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson
when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires
and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire
that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire
can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river
to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the
stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of
wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and
paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all
this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory,
judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to
float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in
which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this
transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct
is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of
psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain
mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we
see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort
of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed
to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and
the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute
investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into
some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar
to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of
unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity
of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will
use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing
circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the
vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that
Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks
to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any
such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.
We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our
popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases
when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the
animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term
instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire
which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual
operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles
of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we
may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.
“_Speech_ is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary
exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is
enabled to develop it into _language_.” This sounds oracular, but, like
most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as
contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things,
and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of
a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more
complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some
grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to
language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no
meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed
through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless
be dignified with the name of an instinct? The _desire_ to speak, or to
communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an
instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has
to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render
him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire
may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of
language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to
it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and
inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the
least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech,
man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would
have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and
all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his
fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for
things, not for words.
The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very
much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled
and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or
skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The
Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them.
Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have
spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large
sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and
balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart
and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud
fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may
boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs,
and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to
this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more
glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man,
than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread,
borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him,
the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great
elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and
exultation.
It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to
the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people
of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus,
employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact,
almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain
proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there
ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus
of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage;
and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or
what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the
attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate,
or other external circumstances, require or suggest different
inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian
may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe
propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it;
they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it
from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their
favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as
Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer
pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake
again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an
agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary
vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the
same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has
thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their _instinct of
pottery_ will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with
the calabash.
Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of
this human art of boat-building:—
“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New
World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those
huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of
iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier
to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and
pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the
forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel
appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but
meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the
memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the
stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest
recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of
twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt
designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a
single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within
it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the
mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the
Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or
celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian
Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with
which it had been fashioned into shape.”
From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this
“allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron
steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the
Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must
arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy
streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some
lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched
some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The
past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the
ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to
embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.
We turn from the rude arts of men to their still ruder thinking—to
customs springing from some sentiment or some strange imagination. Of
these the most universal and the most significant are customs connected
with the burial of the dead. To the habit of interring with the dead man
the implements he most valued in life—his tools or weapons—we owe the
little knowledge we possess of our very primitive ancestors. It is
generally said that these articles were buried with the man, that he
might have them ready for use in another world; and, no doubt, some
vague idea of this kind has extensively prevailed: but if we may
speculate on a subject so obscure as the imaginations of the savage, we
should say that this idea grew out of the custom of burying with the
dead man his own previous possessions, and that the custom itself at
first originated in simple regret and respect for the dead. We cannot
have any strong sentiment without feeling the desire in some way to
manifest it. The dead man was loudly lamented—wept and wailed over—and
the mourners often cut and wounded themselves as an exhibition of their
grief. Well, at such a moment, instead of appropriating to themselves
the possessions of the deceased, the survivors threw them into the grave
with him. They were still in a manner his property. It would manifest a
disrespect to the dead if at once, as soon as the hand of his chief was
cold, another man had seized upon his spear and carried it to his own
hut. Thus this one passionate desire to manifest grief and respect to a
late friend or chief would sufficiently account for the act of interring
with the body the instruments or weapons he had been in the habit of
using. The custom once adopted, superstition would step in and enforce
it, and the imagination would invest it with a new significance. Some
poet of the land would first suggest that, if the dead man rose from his
tomb, he would find himself equipped for the chase or for war. Sometimes
the buried arms, vessels, or other implements, were broken before they
were deposited in the grave, which does not seem to accord with the idea
that they were laid there for any future use. It looks like the
interpretation of a subsequent generation when it is said that the
savage expected the broken tool or perforated vessel, like the decayed
human body, to be restored again and made fit for his use. Here is an
Indian, a Chinook, buried in his canoe. Within the canoe a broken sword
is deposited. Am I to gather that the Chinook expected a maritime life
hereafter, and even to revive floating upon the waters? Does not the
whole act seem, at least in its initiation, to be symbolical? All was at
an end. The man would float no more—would fight no more. The canoe was
buried, the sword was broken.
But whether we are right or not in our supposition as to the origin of
this idea—namely, that the articles buried in the tomb with the deceased
would be useful to him in an after life—it is plain that such an idea
has been entertained, and certainly all our learned writers upon these
ancient customs of burial attribute this motive to our imaginative
forefathers. When, in the old pagan burrows of the wold of Yorkshire or
elsewhere, some British or Saxon charioteer has been exhumed, with the
iron wheel-tires and bronzed horse-furniture (the wreck of the decayed
war-chariot), and the skeletons of the horses, eloquent antiquarians
have not failed to say (as Mr Wilson does) that the dead chief was
buried thus “that he might enter the Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne
in the chariot in which he had been wont to charge amid the ranks of his
foes.” We presume they find themselves justified in this interpretation.
Here, again, we find that the new continent sets almost before the eyes
of our traveller scenes similar to those which, as a European
archæologist, he had been laboriously endeavouring to reconstruct in
some remote antiquity.
“Upwards of forty years since, Black Bird, a famous chief of the
Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and on his return was seized
with smallpox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found
himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of
old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally
fulfilled. The dead warrior was dressed in his most sumptuous robes,
fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and borne about
sixty miles below the Omahaw village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri,
which towers far above all the neighbouring heights, and commands a
magnificent extent of landscape. To the summit of this bluff a
beautiful white steed, the favourite war-horse of Black Bird, was led;
and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed
with great ceremony on its back, looking towards the river, where, as
he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they
traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his
hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by
his side. His store of pemmican and his well-filled tobacco-pouch were
supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of
the great Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his
coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic
charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed;
and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band
covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its
impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the
Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around the feet and
the legs of the horse. Gradually the pile arose under the combined
labour of many willing hands, _until the living steed and its dead
rider were buried together under the memorial mound_; and high over
the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle
plumes a cedar post was reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers
on the Missouri the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief
of the Omahaws.”
But there is one passage in Mr Wilson’s book which, we think, to the
student of the ancient myth or religious legend must be replete with
interest. It occurs in the chapter which treats on the use of tobacco
and that custom of smoking which we have imported from the savage, much
to the delectation, no doubt, of those who inhale the fumes of what they
are pleased to call the fragrant weed, and much, assuredly, to the
disgust and suffering of those who are involved, most unwillingly, in
the smoke which others are _ex_haling around them. Never were two
parties more sharply divided than the smokers and the non-smokers. The
first will doubtless agree with the Indian in the belief that tobacco
was of divine origin. Did not two hunters of the Susquehannas share
their venison with a lovely squaw who mysteriously appeared before them
in the forest? and did they not, “on returning to the scene of their
feast thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant growing where she had
sat?” and do not Indians tell us that the Great Spirit freely indulges
in the intoxicating fumes which they themselves love so well? The
non-smokers hold a different faith. They see no celestial gift in this
black, fuliginous amusement; and if they do not ascribe to it a devilish
origin, they assert that it is enjoyed with a devilish indifference to
those to whom their beloved smoke is but stench and sickness. Into this
custom of tobacco-smoking Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows much
learning on the inquiry; but it is especially to the institution of the
pipe of peace amongst the Indians that we would now direct the attention
of the reader.
We have, as Mr Wilson tells the story, the complete _dissection_ of a
myth; we see how a legend arises, or may arise, partly from the most
trivial causes, and partly from generous impulses and high imaginations.
Between the Minnesota and the Missouri rivers there stands a bold
perpendicular cliff, “beautifully marked with distinct horizontal layers
of light grey and rose or _flesh-coloured_ quartz.” Near this a famous
red pipe-stone is procured; a material, we presume, better fitted than
any other for making pipes. Traces of both ancient and modern excavation
prove that it has been the resort, during many generations, of Indian
tribes, seeking this famous red pipe-stone. A spot to which independent
tribes came for this purpose, and for this only, became neutral ground;
became a spot on which they might meet in peace—perhaps to discuss their
points of difference. But in process of time it became a sacred spot,
and the peace between hostile tribes was preserved by a religious
sanction. There are marks on the rock resembling the track of a large
bird. These were converted into the footsteps of the Great Spirit. The
Great Spirit, therefore, at one time descended upon the rock and
taught—what else could he be supposed to teach?—the sacred neutrality of
the spot, and the privilege and duty of all tribes to renew their pipes
there, and especially the calumet, or pipe of peace. The last version of
the tradition runs thus:—
“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after the red men were made, when all the
different tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them all
together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the
red nations were assembled in infinite numbers in the plain below. He
took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe.
He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh;
that though they were at war they must meet at this place as friends;
that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from
it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get
his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he
disappeared in the cloud.”
The Sioux, notwithstanding this good teaching of the very tradition
which they still repeat to the stranger, have, by the right of the
strongest, taken possession of the sacred neutral ground; and they, and
all other tribes of the red race, are either being absorbed into the
white population or exterminated by it. The development of the myth and
the people of the myth has been therefrom alike arrested. But how
clearly we see its growth and formation! To what a mystical faith that
flesh-coloured quartz was conducting! And what mingling of the divine
and human would have been suggested by the act recorded of the Great
Spirit! If these Indian tribes had finally coalesced in one nation, the
myth would have been exalted, and the Great Spirit would have taught
them an eternal bond of peace and brotherhood. If civilisation and
culture had still further advanced, this peace and brotherhood would
have embraced all mankind, and assumed the form of the highest moral
teaching.
A considerable portion of Mr Wilson’s book is occupied with those
ancient remains, whether in the valley of the Mississippi or in the
forests of Central America, which speak of a civilisation, or at least
of nations and of cities that had existed and left their ruins behind
them, anterior to what we call the discovery of the New World. The
subject is highly interesting, and it loses none of its interest in the
hands of our author. He speaks very decidedly on the great antiquity of
the mounds and the earthworks of the valley of the Mississippi; less
decidedly on the antiquity of the monumental pillars and other
architectural remains which were first brought to the knowledge of the
English public through the travels of Mr Stephens in Central America.
The work of Mr Squiers still contains, we believe, the fullest account
we possess of those vast circular mounds, and other extraordinary
earthworks, discovered within the territory of the United States. Both
these writers, Mr Stephens and Mr Squiers, produced at the time of the
publication of their several works a very vivid impression on the
reading public of England. Both of them broke ground into quite new
fields of inquiry, but both of them left the mind rather excited than
informed. This was to be expected when the subject was of so novel and
surprising a character. Mr Squiers saw evidences of serpent-worship and
of other religious rites which his study of the antiquities of the Old
World had made familiar to his imagination, in the circular mounds which
he traced in the open field: and Mr Stephens, as he broke his way
through the forests, saw the ruins of another Egypt stand before him.
That no tradition should exist amongst the present race of Indians with
respect to these primitive “mound-builders,” is not surprising; nor
would this alone indicate any very great antiquity. Mr Wilson thinks the
state in which the skeletons were found within the tumuli—crumbling to
dust on being touched—is sufficient proof of their great age. One must
know all the circumstances of the burial, all the influences to which
the skeleton has been exposed, before any safe conclusion can be drawn
from this fact. But, leaving undetermined the antiquity of these
remains, we think it plain that the first discoverers of them, whether
of the mounds or of the ruined cities, have, with the natural enthusiasm
pertaining to all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence they display of
civilisation, or progress in the arts. After all, the soundest opinion
seems to be that the “mound-builders” and the builders of the deserted
cities were but the intellectual progenitors of those half-civilised
Mexicans and Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered and destroyed. It
is not likely that any higher or equal state of civilisation had been
attained and lost before the arrival of the Spaniards.
The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to
imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor
would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle.
But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre,
and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for
all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a
smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then
traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained
one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much,
and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination
seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their
appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are
discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of
carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful.
To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance
of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red
Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the
remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself
most under the influence of this _glamour_. If we had not the pictures
or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes
and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the
Atlantic.
Our readers, we are sure, have not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book of
travels; they will remember how he entered with his guide into what
seemed an untrodden forest at Copan, apparently undisturbed from its
very creation; and how, as he made his way with his axe through the
brushwood, he found himself face to face with an upright column of stone
elaborately carved. In the centre of this a human face of gigantic
proportions stared out upon him. Some of these monuments had been
overpowered by the vigorous growth of the surrounding trees, and
displaced from their upright position by huge branches that half
encircled them; others lay upon the ground, as if bound down by the
vines and other great creepers of the American forest. Nothing disturbed
the solitude of the scene except a grimacing procession of monkeys, who
from the branches of the trees were looking alternately at the
traveller, and at the mysterious objects which had attracted the
traveller’s attention. As he proceeded he came upon a truncated pyramid,
with a flight of steps leading to a broad surface, on which evidently
some other structure had been raised; and then again he entered a square
enclosure with steps, which might have been intended for seats, running
up on all sides, reminding him of a Roman amphitheatre. No books had
told him of the existence even of this ruined city. Who had built it,
who had lived in it, no one could say. The people of the country could
only answer him with their “_Quien sabe?_” who knows?—an answer always
sufficient for themselves. There was not even a tradition, not even a
palpable lie, to be heard. Men were as silent about these cities as the
forest itself.
What wonder that the enthusiasm of the traveller should be excited, and
that he should see more than the eye—as a simple optical
instrument—disclosed to him? Assuredly his enthusiasm as to the beauty
of the sculpture is not supported by the drawings he has given us. He
commends to us these drawings of the artist as being, “next to the
stones themselves,” the most perfect materials on which to form our
judgment. And of one thing we may be certain, that a modern artist,
trained to the correct representation of the human figure, would err, if
he erred at all, by _improving the drawing_ in these grotesque
sculptures. It would require a distinct effort in the modern artist to
depart from the true outline and proportions of the human form; and
whenever his attention relaxed, he would infallibly become more correct
than his original. Well, we see in the delineation here given us a mere
pillar, in the centre of which is carved a human face, and lower down
two fat arms, which the imagination is to connect with the unmeaning
face above them; and we are told in the text “that the character of this
image is grand, and it would be difficult to exceed the richness of the
ornament.” We turn the page and see another gigantic head, with huge
saucer eyes, such as a child would draw, and we are told that “the style
is good,” and that “the great expansion of the eyes seems intended to
inspire awe.” So are the masks sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving
boys. But very silly savages must those have been in whom such absurd
figures could have inspired awe. Mr Stephens is constantly being
“arrested by the beauty of the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at Palenque
are indeed superior to anything he met with at Copan, and some drawings
from these exhibit an unexpected grace, and an outline _perhaps_
unconsciously improved by the hand of the artist. But here also we are
startled at the discrepancy between the description of the enraptured
traveller and the representation in the engravings. We have, in one of
them, a figure sitting cross-legged upon a narrow bench; his legs are
tucked up under him painfully tight, and his balance must be preserved
with great difficulty; his large nose is in manifest danger of breaking
itself upon the floor. We are told that this figure sits “on a couch,
ornamented with two leopards’ heads,” and that “the _attitude is easy_,
and the expression calm and benevolent.” The first discoverer must
evidently have looked with something of a lover’s eye.
The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than
in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the
inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various
interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a
favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been
the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan
had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr
Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the
Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven,
as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in
proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be
displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The
Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in
Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which
last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did
Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription
to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them
with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted
them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these
distant regions.”
Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this
inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to
colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency,
of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the
inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it
became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first
discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the _Punic_ was
changed into a _Runic_ inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other
Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton
Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the
name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which
this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates
are not quite so legible.
“Surely no inscription,” continues Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not
even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual Rosetta Stone, ever
received more faithful study. But the most curious matter relating to
this written rock is, that after being thus put to the question by
learned inquisitors for a hundred and fifty years, it did at length
yield a most surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft tested the origin and
significance of the Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting a copy of
it to Chingwauk, an intelligent Indian chief, familiar with the native
system of picture-writing. The result was an interpretation of the
whole as the record of an Indian triumph over some rival native tribe,
and the conviction on Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock is
simply an example of Indian rock-writing, attributable to the
Wabenakies of New England.... And such is the conviction reluctantly
formed in the mind of the most enthusiastic believer in the discovery
and colonisation of New England by the Northmen.”
We are in danger of losing our way entirely amongst the multitude of
interesting subjects which Mr Wilson’s two thick volumes present to
us—and present, it must be confessed, in a somewhat confused array. A
rather pleasant effect is produced by the bringing together the
knowledge of the European archæologist with the observations of the
modern traveller; but this leads to a discursive style. In spite of the
distinct titles of the several chapters, we never know precisely what we
are discussing, and where to look for anything a second time which we
may remember to have read. We are now engaged with the wild Indians, and
are reminded of such human curiosities as the “Flatheads,” who glory in
producing a deformed skull by a distressing pressure on the infant’s
head, of which process we have a gilded picture strangely ornamenting
our learned volumes. These Flatheads are plainly uninjured in their
intellects by this distortion of the skull; so as there is room left for
the development of the cerebrum, all seems right; and even when nature
keeps the formation of the skull in her own hands, we apprehend this is
all that is wanted. These Flatheads contrive to make slaves of the
neighbouring round-headed Indians,—who, by the way, are not permitted to
flatten the heads of _their_ children, this being jealously guarded as a
sign of freedom and aristocratic privileges. They are said to look with
contempt on the whites, as bearing in the shape of their heads the
hereditary mark of slaves. After contemplating for a time these
unprogressive natives, some railroad car comes whizzing past, or the
posts of the electric telegraph remind the author of the go-ahead
American who is gradually appropriating all the soil to himself. We have
a highly characteristic trait mentioned of the new race. Not only does
he cut down forests and break up the prairie, but he trades in
_water-lots_—in land still covered with water; appropriates and sells
half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical
proportion he intends to allow it.
The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr
Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most
English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race
as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians.
Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch,
have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has
grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances,
remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows
the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is
neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of
this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance
and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as
they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they
will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode
of life.
“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the
Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready
acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most
perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to
follow down the course of events by which the continent has been
transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every
fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work
has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters
and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them
their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst
savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters
of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable
aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle.
Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of
the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to
Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’
The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of
the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post
is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the
transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal
claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians
the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the
slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable
only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the
eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen,
not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal
terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this
condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; if,
as new settlers come in, the mixed element disappears, it does so
purely by absorption.
“Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have
recognised the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a
Canadian Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of the
Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and
mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been
going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three
centuries, under every diversity of circumstance.”
This is a far more agreeable idea than that the Indians are being
everywhere _starved_ out of existence by the encroachments of the
European. But that portion of the mixed offspring which adhered to the
Indian tribe, and became Indian in its habits, affords a still more
interesting subject of speculation. On the Red River there is a
settlement of half-breeds, numbering about six thousand. A marked
difference, we are told, “is observable, according to their white
paternity. The French half-breeds are more lively and frank in their
bearing, but also less prone to settle down to drudgery of farming, or
other routine duties of civilised life, than those chiefly of Scottish
descent.” If in both cases the half-breed has been entirely educated by
its Indian parent, this would be a good instance of the influence of
_race_ as separable from the influence of education. These half-breeds
are generally superior in physical as well as mental qualities, and have
greater powers of endurance than any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr
Wilson assures us “that the last traces of the Red blood will disappear,
not by the extinction of the Indian tribes, but by the absorption of the
half-breed minority into the new generations of the predominant race.”
Of the warlike tribes of native Indians some have been induced to settle
down as agriculturists. Some are Roman Catholics, some Protestants. But
we believe it may be stated that all signal amendments or progressive
changes have been accompanied by a mixture of European blood. To this
very day the full-blooded Indian despises the civilisation of the white
man, or at least thinks it something that may be good for the white man,
but by no means good for him. The fierce tribes that constituted the
famous confederacy of the Iroquois, and who have settled in Canada, have
been all more or less tamed, but they have all lost the purity of their
race; and when we hear of the hunter of the prairies taking upon himself
the mode of life of European colonists, we may be sure that this change
has been facilitated by an intermixture of the two races. Some of these
tribes have forgotten their own language, and speak only a French
_patois_.
We do not imply by this observation that the native Indian would have
been incapable of advancing by a slow and natural progression of their
own on the road of civilisation: on the contrary, we believe that the
civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians may be seen in its earliest
stage amongst the Iroquois. But when the European encounters the savage,
there is a gap between them which the latter cannot suddenly traverse.
The intermediate steps are not presented to him. The time is not given
him by which slow-changing habits can be formed and transmitted. He is
required to proceed at a faster pace than his savage nature can
accomplish. Now, as every generation that has advanced upon its
predecessors, transmits, together with its knowledge, some increasing
aptitude for the acquisition of such knowledge, there is no difficulty
in believing that the savage would be expedited in his career of
civilisation as well by an intermixture of race as by a participation of
knowledge.
The whole chapter of Mr Wilson on the Red Race is well worthy of
perusal. The reader will find in it many interesting details, which, of
course, our space will not permit us to allude to. We shall conclude our
notice by some reference to a topic especially interesting when we speak
of the progress of civilisation—namely, the mode of transmitting ideas,
the art of writing, or letters. Our author, according to his favourite
phraseology, entitles his chapter on this subject ‘The Intellectual
Instinct: Letters.’
The origin of language may be open to discussion. Its gradual growth
from the wants, the social passions, the organisation, the mimetic and
reasoning powers of man, may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory
account. But no one disputes that _writing_ is an invention of man. Even
if the steps of this invention had not been traced, we should have been
unable to frame any other hypothesis with regard to an art possessed by
one people and not possessed by another. We may define writing to be the
transmission of ideas by visible and permanent signs, instead of by
momentary sounds and gestures. The art of writing, it must be
remembered, is not complete till the characters upon the paper, or the
parchment, or the plaster of the wall, or the graven rock, _interpret
themselves_ to one who knows the conventional value of the several
signs. So long as any picture-writing or symbolic figures act merely as
aids to the memory, in retaining a history of events which is, in fact,
transmitted by oral tradition, writing is not yet invented. The picture,
however faithful, gives its meaning only to those who know many other
facts which are not in the picture itself. When a system of signs has
been invented, _by which alone_ the ideas of one person, or one
generation, can be communicated to another person or another generation,
then the art has been attained, whether those signs are hieroglyphics or
alphabetical, whether they are signs of things or signs of words.
This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of
pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with
the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has
been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in
Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are
invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is
understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a
meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just
as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on
any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind
which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the
history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A
representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would
help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once
extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should
waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to _read_ what was not, in fact,
any kind of _writing_.
The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics,
a kind of _memoria technica_. With certain knots in strings of different
colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show
you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.”
To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to
associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their
_quipus_ would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must
be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the
North American Indians had their _wampum_, their many-coloured belt,
into which _they talked their treaty_, or any other matter it was
desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their
picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a
system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one
generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of
writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different
opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of
Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the
conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in
advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson
says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude
abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec
picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of
ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a
word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”
We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing
before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we
ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others
who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the
very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we
have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated
“hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had
been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by
the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure
whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole
conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual
representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other
engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the
arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent
repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of
invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency
to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not
surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or
that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the
engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that
a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but
suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will
inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key
ever existed.
Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own
excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing
with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt
some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture
and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have
heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and
other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity,
who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by
which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever
remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion
that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine
learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming
to any satisfactory result.
What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey
to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the
history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow
an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ,
at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on
what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over
its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the
Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of
man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned
man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher
for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in
motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper
world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later
interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,”
without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and
the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily
conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a
pictorial representation alone.
We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined
cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of
symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of
one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would
probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own
conjectures. He says:—
“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well
as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central
America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in
perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any
ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics
are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined,
representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are
no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of
sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which
picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American
civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity
which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the
hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque
sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an
infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the
characteristics of this form of writing.”
What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to
carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or
knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression
of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the
epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story
of some good _padre_, who had assured him that a native Indian city,
greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing
and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European
traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced
him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct
civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He
seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have
been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at
that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been
incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this
account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been
built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them,
prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such _oscillations_, very
likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some
of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to
the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which
the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression
is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has
been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in
the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.
The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much
interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no
difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these
ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and
earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily
inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to
what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were
constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered
wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This
last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative
philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed,
by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we
must not call a _disproportionate_ length, because we have not the whole
life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those
progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks
they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems
an _improbable_ length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of
the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not
say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten
past he can bring to light.
CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’
PART XVI.
NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.
Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is
immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar
phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of
art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason.
Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or
in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined
to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts
cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic
arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure
science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with
expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science
makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of
a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that
all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are
equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to
prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem
in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge
the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by
the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions,
as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to
his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and
science have their meeting-point in method.
And though Kant applies the word _genius_ (_ingenium_) strictly to the
cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science,
yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted
to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe
the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect,
because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far
intuitive or innate (_ingenium_) that, though study and practice perfect
it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into
order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and
dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who
possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must
possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a
philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the
talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a
philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there
is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less
perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives
some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of
the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of
a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as
science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the
mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while,
in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the
curves of grace.
And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed
to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination
are works of Art _par emphasis_, for they require much more than the
elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part
company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of
Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms
of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the
Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The _beau ideal_ is not in
the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the
reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them
there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived,
and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a
much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a
positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as
applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I
attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who
have denied that genius in reality _creates_; inasmuch as the forms it
presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New
combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is
not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though
the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the
Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did
before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to
trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined
out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when
it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the
watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not
created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the
materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so
far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell
in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that
that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form,
though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree,
a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases
in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the
Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature;
for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create
dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by
the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts
into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as
the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect
thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one
form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the
Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a
creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know
before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the
decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles
is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer
is alive to-day.
By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art
in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in
eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the
objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in
either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a
sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my
scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who
reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind,
other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs
to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to
his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of
nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit
that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s
‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets;
‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective
poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.
But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great
artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a
mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an
admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him
who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior
to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is
epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is
incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though
they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious,
that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers
of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his
subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one
of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist
than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.
Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination,
and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if
tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most
exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple
qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has
resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared
with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of
Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among
the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the
imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or
moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed.
The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing
to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring
longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered.
Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty
lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute
survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however
elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and
perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction,
one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of
thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also
surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not
a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and
imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is
most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s
Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression
of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the
salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or
fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do
the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts
of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a
more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to
be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts
well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the
ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy
contemplations of our age.
_Cæteris paribus_, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over
prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his
own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of
posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own
organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For
these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For
instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to
say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all;
whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on
the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful
drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I
do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama,
though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to
the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as
belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked
by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have
achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to
him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare
has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote
the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether
Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as
readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or
other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in
verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold
the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably
superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the
lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and
bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is
not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the
greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille,
Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you
inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song
he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to
return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert
an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic
composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments
and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction,
so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I
speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember
well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two
great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many
literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure
that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their
conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and
guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank
and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an
experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it
prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other
countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the
drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to
this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes.
The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the
steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which
the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most
attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there
should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who
can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel.
Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write
well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who
cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write
what they call novels?—
“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”
says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies
in most force to that class of _poemata_, which pretends to narrate
the epic of life in the form of prose. For the _docti_ as well as
the _indocti_—men the most learned in all but the art of
novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and
often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with
a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is
for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and
Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and
speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to
the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with
which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy.
Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three
volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those
processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History
of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers,
which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without
the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the
slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern
times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic
beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all
works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so
purely in the imagination, _that the artist never seeks to represent
the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth_. As HEGEL
well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely
individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially
destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is
designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination,
sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow
his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in
matters ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be
an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.
Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of
imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most
general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall
of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all
Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still
acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend from
the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing; when Mr
Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very plot consist
in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the immortality of the
soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle of dealing, not
with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded the point at which
he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his argument beyond the
doctrine on which all theologians concur, into questions on which they
dispute, he would have lost sight of art altogether. So in politics—the
general propositions from which politics start—the value of liberty,
order, civilisation, &c.—are not only within the competent range of
imaginative fiction, but form some of its loftiest subjects; but descend
lower into the practical questions that divide the passions of a day,
and you only waste all the complicated machinery of fiction, to do what
you could do much better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same
fine critic, whom I have previously quoted, says, with admirable
eloquence:—
“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring
to get beyond them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more
pure and more true, where all the oppositions and contradictions of
the finite disappear—where his intellectual liberty, spreading its
wings, without obstacles and without limits, attains to its supreme
end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The
necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections
of the real. The mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms,
the free development of life, and especially of mind.”
What is herein said of Art more especially applies to the art of
narrative fiction, whether it take the form of verse or prose. For, when
we come to that realm of fiction which, whether in verse or prose, is
rendered most alluring to us, either by the fashion of our time or the
genius of the artist, it is with a desire to escape, for the moment, out
of this hard and narrow positive world in which we live; to forget, for
a brief holiday, disputes between High and Low Church, Tories and
Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of _particulars_ in the contemplation of
_general_ truths. We can have our real life, in all its harsh outlines,
whenever we please it; we do not want to see that real life, but its
ideal image, in the fable land of art. There is another error common
enough in second-rate novelists, and made still more common because it
is praised by ordinary critics—viz., an attempt at the exact imitation
of what is called Nature; one writer will thus draw a character in
fiction as minutely as he can, from some individual he has met in
life—another perplexes us with the precise _patois_ of provincial
mechanics—not as a mere relief to the substance of a dialogue, but as a
prevalent part of it. Now I hold all this to be thoroughly antagonistic
to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment of generals for the servile
copy of particulars.... It cannot be too often repeated that art is
_not_ the imitation of nature; it is only in the very lowest degree of
poetry—viz., the Descriptive, that the imitation of nature can be
considered an artistic end. Even there, the true poet brings forth from
nature more than nature says to the common ear or reveals to the common
eye. The strict imitation of nature has always in it a something trite
and mean—a man who mimics the cackle of the goose or the squeak of a
pig, so truthfully, that for the moment he deceives us—attains but a
praise that debases him. Nor this because there is something in the
cackle of the goose, and the squeak of pig, that in itself has a mean
association; for as Kant says truly, “Even a man’s exact imitation of
the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a
mimicry, and not the nightingale.” Art does not imitate nature, but it
founds itself on the study of nature—takes from nature the selections
which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that
which nature does not possess—viz., _the mind and the soul of man_.
Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in
exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which, if we want to see
only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so
he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a
man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied
nature.” If I want to see that kind of man I could see him better in
Oxford Street than in a novel. The great artist deals with large
generalities, broad types of life and character, and though he may take
flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the
figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. A
porter sate to Correggio for the representation of a saint; but
Correggio so painted the porter, that the porter, on the canvass, was
lost in the saint.
Some critics have contended that the delineation of character
artistically—viz., through the selection of broad generalities in the
complex nature of mankind, rather than in the observation of particulars
by the portraiture of an individual—fails of the verisimilitude and
reality—of the flesh-and-blood likeness to humanity—which all vivid
delineation of human character necessarily requires. But this objection
is sufficiently confuted by a reference to the most sovereign
masterpieces of imaginative literature. The principal characters in
Homer—viz., Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, Paris, Thersites, &c.—are
so remarkably the types of large and enduring generalities in human
character, that, in spite of all changes of time and manners, we still
classify and designate individuals under those antique representative
names. We call such or such a man the Ulysses, or Nestor, or Achilles,
or Thersites of his class or epoch. Virgil, on the contrary, has, in
Æneas, but a feeble shadow reflected from no bodily form with which we
are familiar, precisely because Æneas is not a type of any large and
lasting generality in human character, but a poetised and
half-allegorical _silhouette_ of Augustus. There is, indeed, an
antagonistic difference between fictitious character and biographical
character. In biography, truth must be sought in the preference of
particulars to generals; in imaginative creations truth is found in the
preference of generals to particulars. We recognise this distinction
more immediately with respect to the former. In biography, and indeed in
genuine history, character appears faithful and vivid in proportion as
it stands clear from all æsthetic purposes in the mind of the
delineator. The moment the biographer or historian seeks to drape his
personages in the poetic mantle, to subject their lives and actions to
the poetic or idealising process, we are immediately and rightly seized
with distrust of his accuracy. When he would dramatise his characters
into types, they are unfaithful as likenesses. In like manner, if we
carefully examine, we shall see that when the Poet takes on himself the
task of the Biographer, and seeks to give minute representations of
living individuals, his characters become conventional—only partially
accurate—the accuracy being sought by exaggerating trivial peculiarities
into salient attributes, rather than by the patient exposition of the
concrete qualities which constitute the interior nature of living men.
Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself unconsciously to the artist; and mars
the catholic and enduring truthfulness which, in works of imagination,
belongs exclusively to the invention of original images for æsthetic
ends.
Goethe, treating of the drama, has said, that “to be theatrical a piece
must be symbolical; that is to say, every action must have an importance
of its own, and it must tend to one more important still.” It is still
more important, for dramatic effect, that the _dramatis personæ_ should
embody attributes of passion, humour, sentiment, character, with which
large miscellaneous audiences can establish sympathy; and sympathy can
be only established by such a recognition of a something familiar to our
own natures, or to our conception of our natures, as will allure us to
transport ourselves for the moment into the place of those who are
passing through events which are not familiar to our actual experience.
None of us have gone through the events which form the action of Othello
or Phèdre; but most of us recognise in our natures, or our conceptions
of our natures, sufficient elements for ardent love or agonising
jealousy, to establish a sympathy with the agencies by which, in Othello
and Phèdre, those passions are expressed. Thus, the more forcibly the
characters interest the generalities of mankind which compose an
audience, the more truthfully they must represent what such generalities
of mankind have in common—in short, the more they will be types, and the
less they will be portraits. Some critics have supposed that, in the
delineation of types, the artist would fall into the frigid error of
representing mere philosophical abstractions. This, however, is a
mistake which the poet who comprehends and acts upon the first principle
of his art—viz., the preference of generals to particulars—will be the
less likely to commit, in proportion as such generals are vivified into
types of humanity. For he is not seeking to personate allegorically a
passion; but to show the effects of the passion upon certain given forms
of character under certain given situations: And he secures the
individuality required, and avoids the lifeless pedantry of an
allegorised abstraction, by reconciling passion, character, and
situation with each other; so that it is always a living being in whom
we sympathise. And the rarer and more unfamiliar the situation of life
in which the poet places his imagined character, the more in that
character itself we must recognise relations akin to our own flesh and
blood, in order to feel interest in its fate. Thus, in the hands of
great masters of fiction, whether dramatists or novelists, we become
unconsciously reconciled, not only to unfamiliar, but to improbable,
nay, to impossible situations, by recognising some marvellous
truthfulness to human nature in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of
the character represented, granting that such a character _could_ be
placed in such a situation. The finest of Shakespeare’s imaginary
characters are essentially typical. No one could suppose that the poet
was copying from individuals of his acquaintance in the delineations of
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Angelo, Romeo. They are as remote from
portraiture as are the conceptions of Caliban and Ariel. In fine, the
distinctive excellence of Shakespeare’s highest characters is that,
while they embody truths the most subtle, delicate, and refining in the
life and organisation of men, those truths are so assorted as to combine
with the elements which humanity has most in common. And it is obvious
to any reader of ordinary reflection, that this could not be effected if
the characters themselves, despite all that is peculiar to each, were
not, on the whole, typical of broad and popular divisions in the human
family.
Turning to prose fiction, if we look to the greatest novel which Europe
has yet produced (meaning by the word novel a representation of familiar
civilised life)—viz., ‘Gil Blas’—we find the characters therein are
vivid and substantial, capable of daily application to the life around
us, in proportion as they are types and not portraits—such as Ambrose
Lamela, Fabricio, the Archbishop of Toledo, &c.; and the characters that
really fail of truth and completion are those which were intended to be
portraits of individuals—such as Olivares, the Duke de Lerma, the Infant
of Spain, &c. And if it be true that, in Sangrado, Le Sage designed the
portrait of the physician Hecquet (the ingenious author of the “Système
de la Trituration),” and, in the poetical charlatan Triaquero, aimed at
a likeness of Voltaire, all we can say is, that no two portraits can be
more unfaithful to the originals; and whatever belongs to the characters
worthy the genius of the author is to be found in those strokes and
touches by which the free play of humour involuntarily destroys the
exactitude of portraiture. Again, with that masterpiece of prose romance
or fantasy ‘Don Quixote,’ the character of the hero, if it could be
regarded as that of an individual whom Cervantes found in life, would be
only an abnormal and morbid curiosity subjected to the caricature of a
satirist. But regarded as a type of certain qualities which are largely
diffused throughout human nature, the character is psychologically true,
and artistically completed; hence we borrow the word “Quixotic” whenever
we would convey the idea of that extravagant generosity of enthusiasm
for the redress of human wrongs, which, even in exciting ridicule,
compels admiration and conciliates love. The grandeur of the conception
of ‘Don Quixote’ is its fidelity to a certain nobleness of sentiment,
which, however latent or however modified, exists in every genuinely
noble nature. And hence, perhaps, of all works of broad humour, ‘Don
Quixote’ is that which most approximates the humorous to the side of the
sublime.
The reflective spirit of our age has strongly tended towards the
development of a purpose in fiction, symbolical in a much more literal
sense of the word than Goethe intended to convey in the extract I have
quoted on the symbolical nature of theatrical composition. Besides the
interest of plot and incident, another interest is implied, more or less
distinctly or more or less vaguely, which is that of the process and
working out of a symbolical purpose interwoven with the popular action.
Instead of appending to the fable a formal moral, a moral signification
runs throughout the whole fable, but so little obtrusively, that, even
at the close, it is to be divined by the reader, not explained by the
author. This has been a striking characteristic of the art of our
century. In the former century it was but very partially cultivated, and
probably grows out of that reaction from materialism which distinguishes
our age from the last. Thus—to quote the most familiar illustrations I
can think of—in Goethe’s novel of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ besides the mere
interest of the incidents, there is an interest in the inward
signification of an artist’s apprenticeship in art, of a man’s
apprenticeship in life. In ‘Transformation,’ by Mr Hawthorne, the mere
story of outward incident can never be properly understood, unless the
reader’s mind goes along with the exquisite mysticism which is
symbolised by the characters. In that work, often very faulty in the
execution, exceedingly grand in the conception, are typified the
classical sensuous life, through Donato; the Jewish dispensation,
through Miriam; the Christian dispensation, through Hilda, who looks
over the ruins of Rome from her virgin chamber amidst the doves.
To our master novelists of a former age—to Defoe, Fielding, Richardson,
and Smollett—this double plot, if so I may call it, was wholly unknown.
Swift, indeed, apprehended it in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ which I consider
the greatest poem—that is, the greatest work of pure imagination and
original invention—of the age in which he lived; and Johnson divined it
in ‘Rasselas,’ which, but for the interior signification, would be the
faulty and untruthful novel which Lord Macaulay has, I venture to opine,
erroneously declared it to be. Lord Macaulay censures ‘Rasselas’ because
the Prince of Abyssinia does not talk like an Abyssinian. Now, it seems
to me that a colouring faithful to the manners of Abyssinia, is a detail
so trivial in reference to the object of the author of a philosophical
romance, that it is more artistic to omit than to observe it. Rasselas
starts at once, not from a positive but from an imagined world—he starts
from the Happy Valley to be conducted (in his progress through actual
life, to the great results of his search after a happiness more perfect
than that of the Happy Valley) to the Catacombs. This is the interior
poetical signification of the tale of ‘Rasselas’—the final result of all
departure from the happy land of contented ignorance is to be found at
the grave. There, alone, a knowledge happier than ignorance awaits the
seeker beyond the catacombs. For a moral so broad, intended for
civilised readers, any attempt to suit colouring and manners to
Abyssinian savages would have been, not an adherence to, but a violation
of, Art. The artist here wisely disdains the particulars—he is dealing
with generals.
Thus Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ is no more a Babylonian than Johnson’s
‘Rasselas’ is an Abyssinian. Voltaire’s object of philosophical satire
would have been perfectly lost if he had given us an accurate and
antiquarian transcript of the life of the Chaldees; and, indeed, the
worst parts in ‘Zadig’ (speaking artistically), are those in which the
author does, now and then, assume a _quasi_ antique oriental air, sadly
at variance with meanings essentially modern, couched in irony
essentially French.
But the writer who takes this duality of purpose—who unites an interior
symbolical signification with an obvious popular interest in character
and incident—errs, firstly, in execution, if he render his symbolical
meaning so distinct and detailed as to become obviously
allegorical—unless, indeed, as in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ it is
avowedly an allegory; and, secondly, he errs in artistic execution of
his plan, whenever he admits a dialogue not closely bearing on one or
the other of his two purposes, and whenever he fails in merging the two
into an absolute unity at the end.
Now, the fault I find chiefly with novelists is their own contempt for
their craft. A clever and scholarlike man enters into it with a
dignified contempt. “I am not going to write,” he says, “a mere novel.”
What, then, is he going to write? What fish’s tail will he add to the
horse’s head? A tragic poet might as well say, “I am not going to write
a mere tragedy.” The first essential to success in the art you practise
is respect for the art itself. Who could ever become a good shoemaker if
he did not have a profound respect for the art of making shoes? There is
an ideal even in the humblest mechanical craft. A shoemaker destined to
excel his rivals will always have before his eye the vision of a perfect
shoe, which he is always striving to realise, and never can. It was well
said by Mr Hazlitt, “That the city prentice who did not think the Lord
Mayor in his gilded coach was the greatest of human beings would come to
be hanged.” Whatever our calling be, we can never rise in it unless we
exalt, even to an exaggerated dignity, the elevation of the calling
itself. We are noble peasants or noble kings just in proportion as we
form a lofty estimate of the nobility that belongs to peasants or the
nobility that belongs to kings.
We may despair of the novelist who does not look upon a novel as a
consummate work of art—who does not apply to it, as Fielding
theoretically, as Scott practically, did, the rules which belong to the
highest order of imagination. Of course he may fail of his standard, but
he will fail less in proportion as the height of his standard elevates
his eye and nerves his sinews.
The first object of a novelist is to interest his reader; the next
object is the quality of the interest. Interest in his story is
essential, or he will not be read; but if the quality of the interest be
not high, he will not be read a second time. And if he be not read a
second time by his own contemporaries, the chance is that he will not be
read once by posterity. The degree of interest is for the many—the
quality of interest for the few. But the many are proverbially fickle,
the few are constant. Steadfast minorities secure, at last, the success
of great measures, and confirm, at last, the fame of great writings.
I have said that many who, in a healthful condition of our stage, would
be dramatists, become novelists. But there are some material
distinctions between the dramatic art and the narrative—distinctions as
great as those between the oratorical style and the literary. Theatrical
effects displease in a novel. In a novel much more than in a drama must
be explained and accounted for. On the stage the actor himself
interprets the author; and a look, a gesture, saves pages of writing. In
a novel the author elevates his invention to a new and original story;
in a drama, I hold that the author does well to take at least the broad
outlines of a story already made. It is an immense advantage to him to
find the tale he is to dramatise previously told, whether in a history,
a legend, a romance, or in the play of another age or another land; and
the more the tale be popularly familiarised to the audience, the higher
will be the quality of the interest he excites. Thus, in the Greek
tragedy, the story and the characters were selected from the popular
myths. Thus Shakespeare takes his story either from chronicles or
novels. Thus Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire take, from scenes of
antiquity the most familiarly known, their fables and their characters.
Nor is it only an advantage to the dramatist that the audience should
come to the scene somewhat prepared by previous association for the
nature of the interest invoked; it is also an advantage to the dramatist
that his invention—being thus relieved from the demand on its powers in
what, for the necessities of the dramatic art, is an unimportant if not
erroneous direction of art—is left more free to combine the desultory
materials of the borrowed story into the harmony of a progressive
plot—to reconcile the actions of characters, whose existence the
audience take for granted, with probable motives—and, in a word, to
place the originality there where alone it is essential to the
drama—viz., in the analysis of the heart, in the delineation of passion,
in the artistic development of the idea and purpose which the drama
illustrates through the effects of situation and the poetry of form.
But in the narrative of prose fiction an original story is not an
auxiliary or erroneous, but an essential, part of artistic invention;
and even where the author takes the germ of his subject and the sketch
of his more imposing characters from History, he will find that he will
be wanting in warmth of interest if the tale he tells be not distinct
from that of the history he presses into his service—more prominently
brought forward, more minutely wrought out—and the character of the age
represented, not only through the historical characters introduced, but
those other and more general types of life which he will be compelled to
imagine for himself. This truth is recognised at once when we call to
mind such masterpieces in historical fiction as ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth,’
‘Quentin Durward,’ and ‘_I Promessi Sposi_.’
In the tragic drama, however, historical subjects appear to necessitate
a different treatment from that which most conduces to the interest of
romantic narrative. There is a dignity in historical characters which
scarcely permits them to be transferred to the stage without playing
before the audience the important parts which they played in life. When
they enter on the scene they excite a predominating interest, and we
should not willingly see them deposed into secondary agencies in the
conduct of the story. They ought not to be introduced at all, unless in
fitting correspondence with our notions of the station they occupied and
the influence they exercised in the actual world; and thus, whether they
are made fated victims through their sufferings, or fateful influences
through their power, still, in the drama, it is through them that the
story moves: them the incidents affect—them the catastrophe
involves—whether for their triumph or their fall.
The drama not necessitating an original fable nor imaginary characters,
that which it does necessitate in selecting a historical subject is, the
art of so arranging and concentrating events in history as to form a
single action, terminating in a single end, wrought through progressive
incidents clearly linked together. It will be seen that the dramatic
treatment is, in this respect, opposed to the purely historical
treatment; for in genuine history there are innumerable secondary causes
tending to each marked effect, which the dramatist must wholly eliminate
or set aside. He must, in short, aim at generals to the exclusion of
particulars.
And thus, as his domain is the passions, he must seek a plot which
admits of situations for passion, and characters in harmony with such
situations. Great historical events in themselves are rarely
dramatic—they are made so on the stage by the appeal to emotions with
which, in private life, the audience are accustomed to sympathise. The
preservation of the Republic of Venice from a conspiracy would have an
interest in history from causes appealing to political reasoning, that
would be wholly without interest on the stage. The dramatist, therefore,
places the preservation of Venice in the struggle of a woman’s heart
between the conflicting passions, with which, in private life, the
audience could most readily sympathise. According as Belvidera acts, as
between her husband and her father, Venice will be saved or lost. This
is dramatic treatment—it is not historical. All delineations of passion
involve the typical; because whoever paints a passion common to mankind
presents us with a human type of that passion, varied, indeed, through
the character of an individual and the situations in which he is placed;
but still, in the expression of the passion itself, sufficiently germane
to all in whom that passion exists, whether actively or latently, to
permit the spectator to transfer himself into the place and person of
him who represents it. Hence the passions of individuals, though
affecting only themselves, or a very confined range of persons connected
with them, command, in reality, a far wider scope in artistic treatment
than the political events affecting millions in historical fact. For
political events, accurately and dispassionately described, are special
to the time and agents—they are traced through the logic of the reason,
which only a comparative few exercise, and even the few exercise it in
the calm of their closets, they do not come into the crowd of a theatre
for its exercise. But the passions of love, ambition, jealousy—the
conflict between opposing emotions of affection and duty—expressed in
the breast of an individual, are not special,—they are universal. And
before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in
the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more
ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal
amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be
the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the
interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in
which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into
generals. In the emancipation of Switzerland from the Austrian yoke,
history can excite our interest in the question whether William Tell
ever existed—and in showing the large array of presumptive evidence
against the popular story of his shooting the apple placed on his son’s
head. But in the drama William Tell is the personator of the Swiss
liberties; and the story of the apple, in exciting the domestic interest
of the relationship between father and son, is that very portion of
history which the dramatic artist will the most religiously
conserve,—obtaining therein one incalculable advantage for his
effect—viz., that it is not his own invention, and therefore of
disputable probability; but, whether fable or truth in the eyes of the
historical critic, so popularly received and acknowledged as a truth,
that the audience are prepared to enter into the emotions of the father,
and the peril of the son.
It is, then, not in the invention of a story, nor in the creation of
imaginary characters, that a dramatist proves his originality as an
artist, but in the adaptation of a story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic
purpose; and in the fidelity, not to historical detail, but to
psychological and metaphysical truth with which he reconciles the
motives and conduct of the characters he selects from history, to the
situations in which they are placed, so as to elicit for them, under all
that is peculiar to their nature or their fates, the necessary degree of
sympathy from emotions of which the generality of mankind are
susceptible.
But to the narrator of fiction—to the story-teller—the invention of
fable and of imaginary character is obviously among the legitimate
conditions of his art; and a fable purely original has in him a merit
which it does not possess in the tragic or comic poet.
On the other hand, the skilful mechanism of plot, though not without
considerable value in the art of narrative, is much less requisite in
the Novelist than in the Dramatist. Many of the greatest prose fictions
are independent of plot altogether. It is only by straining the word to
a meaning foreign to the sense it generally conveys, that we can
recognise a plot in ‘Don Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture of the word
can make a plot out of ‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason that the novel
admits of what the drama never should admit—viz., the operation of
_accident_ in the conduct of the story: the villain, instead of coming
to a tragic close through the inevitable sequences of the fate he has
provoked, may be carried off, at the convenient time, by a stroke of
apoplexy, or be run over by a railway train. Nevertheless, in artistic
narrative, accident, where it affects a _dénouement_, should be very
sparingly employed. Readers, as well as critics, feel it to be a blot in
the story of ‘Rob Roy’ when the elder brothers of Rashleigh Osbaldistone
are killed off by natural causes unforeseen and unprepared for in the
previous train of events narrated, in order to throw Rashleigh into a
position which the author found convenient for his ultimate purpose.
A novel of high aim requires, of course, delineation of character, and
with more patient minuteness, than the drama; and some novels live,
indeed, solely through the delineation of character; whereas there are
some tragedies in which the characters, when stripped of theatrical
costume, are very trivial, but which, despite the poverty of character,
are immortal, partly from the skill of the plot, partly from the passion
which is wrought out of the situations, and principally, perhaps, from
the beauty of form—the strength and harmony of the verse. This may be
said of the French drama generally, and of Racine in especial. The
tragic drama imperatively requires passion—the comic drama humour or
wit; but a novel may be a very fine one without humour, passion, or
wit—it may be made great in its way (though that way is not the very
highest one) by delicacy of sentiment, interest of story, playfulness of
fancy, or even by the level tenor of everyday life, not coarsely
imitated, but pleasingly idealised. Still mystery is one of the most
popular and effective sources of interest in a prose narrative, and
sometimes the unravelling of it constitutes the entire plot. Every one
can remember the thrill with which he first sought to fathom the dark
secret in ‘Caleb Williams’ or ‘The Ghost-Seer.’ Even in the comic novel,
the great founder of that structure of art has obtained praise for
perfection of plot almost solely from the skill with which Tom Jones’s
parentage is kept concealed; the terror, towards the end, when the hero
seems to have become involved in one of the crimes from which the human
mind most revolts, and the pleased surprise with which that terror is
relieved by the final and unexpected discovery of his birth, with all
the sense of the many fine strokes of satire in the commencement of the
tale, which are not made clear to us till the close.
To prose fiction there must always be conceded an immense variety in the
modes of treatment—a bold licence of loose capricious adaptation of
infinite materials to some harmonious unity of interest, which even the
most liberal construction of dramatic licence cannot afford to the
drama. We need no lengthened examination of this fact; we perceive at
once that any story can be told, but comparatively very few stories can
be dramatised. And hence some of the best novels in the world cannot be
put upon the stage; while some, that have very little merit as novels,
have furnished subject-matter for the greatest plays in the modern
world. The interest in a drama must be consecutive, sustained,
progressive—it allows of no _longueurs_. But the interest of a novel may
be very gentle, very irregular—may interpose long conversations in the
very midst of action—always provided, however, as I have before said,
that they bear upon the ulterior idea for which the action is invented.
Thus we have in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ long conversations on art or
philosophy just where we want most to get on with the story—yet, without
those conversations, the story would not have been worth the telling;
and its object could not, indeed, be comprehended—its object being the
accomplishment of a human mind in the very subjects on which the
conversations turn. So, in many of the most animated tales of Sir Walter
Scott, the story pauses for the sake of some historical disquisition
necessary to make us understand the altered situations of the imagined
characters. I need not say that all such delays to the action would be
inadmissible in the drama. Hence an intelligent criticism must always
allow a latitude to artistic prose fiction which it does not accord to
the dramatic, nor indeed to any other department of imaginative
representation of life and character. I often see in our Reviews a
charge against some novel, that this or that is “a defect of art,” which
is, when examined, really a beauty in art—or a positive necessity which
that department of art could not avoid—simply because the Reviewer has
been applying to the novel rules drawn from the drama, and not only
inapplicable, but adverse, to the principles which regulate the freedom
of the novel. Now, in reality, where genius is present, art cannot be
absent. Unquestionably, genius may make many incidental mistakes in art,
but if it compose a work of genius, that work must be a work of art on
the whole. For just as virtue consists in a voluntary obedience to moral
law, so genius consists in a voluntary obedience to artistic law. And
the freedom of either is this, that the law is pleasing to it—has become
its second nature. Both human virtue and human genius must err from time
to time; but any prolonged disdain, or any violent rupture, of the law
by which it exists, would be death to either. There is this difference
to the advantage of virtue (for, happily, virtue is necessary to all
men, and genius is but the gift of few), that we can lay down rules by
the observance of which any one can become a virtuous man; but we can
lay down no rules by which any one can become a man of genius. No
technical rules can enable a student to become a great dramatist or a
great novelist; but there is in art an inherent distinction between
broad general principles and technical rules. In all genuine art there
is a sympathetic, affectionate, and often quite unconscious adherence to
certain general principles. The recognition of these principles is
obtained through the philosophy of criticism; first, by a wide and
patient observation of masterpieces of art, which are to criticism what
evidences of fact are to science; and next, by the metaphysical
deduction, from those facts, of the principles which their concurrence
serves to establish. By the putting forth of these principles we cannot
make bad writers good, nor mediocre writers great; but we may enable the
common reader to judge with more correctness of the real quality of
merit, or the real cause of defect, in the writers he peruses; and by
directing and elevating his taste, rectify and raise the general
standard of literature. We may do more than that—we may much facilitate
the self-tuition that all genius has to undergo before it attains to its
full development, in the harmony between its freedom and those elements
of truth and beauty which constitute its law. As to mere technical
rules, each great artist makes them for himself; he does not despise
technical rules, but he will not servilely borrow them from other
artists; he forms his own. They are the by-laws which his acquaintance
with his special powers lays down as best adapted to their exercise and
their sphere. Apelles is said to have made it a by-law to himself to use
only four colours in painting: probably Apelles found his advantage in
that restraint, or he would not have imposed it on his pallet. But if
Zeuxis found that he, Zeuxis, painted better by using a dozen colours
than by confining himself to four, he would have used a dozen, or he
would not have been Zeuxis.
On careful and thoughtful examination we shall find, that neither in
narrative nor dramatic fiction do great writers differ on the principles
of art in the works which posterity accepts from them as great—whereas
they all differ more or less in technical rules. There is no great
poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his best
works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised image
of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of nature—who ever
prefers the selection of particulars, in the delineation of character or
the conception of fable, to the expression of generals—who does not aim
at large types of mankind rather than the portraiture of
contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may have been led to reject
these principles, it will be in performances that are allowed to be
beneath him. But merely technical rules are no sooner laid down by the
critics of one age, than they are scornfully violated by some triumphant
genius in the next. Technical rules have their value for the artist who
employs them, and who usually invents and does not borrow them. Those
that he imposes on himself he seldom communicates to others. They are
his secret—they spring from his peculiarities of taste; and it is the
adherence to those rules which constitutes what we sometimes call his
style, but more properly his manner. It is by such rules, imposed on
himself, that Pope forms his peculiar cæsura, and mostly closes his
sense at the end of a couplet. When this form of verse becomes trite and
hackneyed, up rises some other poet, who forms by-laws for himself,
perhaps quite the reverse. All that we should then ask of him is
success: if his by-laws enable him to make as good a verse as Pope’s in
another way, we should be satisfied; if not—not. One main use in
technical rules to an author, if imposed on himself, or freely assented
to by himself, is this—the interposition of some wholesome impediment to
the over-facility which otherwise every writer acquires by practice. And
as this over-facility is naturally more apt to be contracted in prose
than in verse, and in the looseness or length of the novel or romance,
than in any other more terse and systematic form of imaginative
fiction—so I think it a wise precaution in every prolific novelist to
seek rather to multiply, than emancipate himself from, the wholesome
restraints of rules; provided always that such rules are the natural
growth of his own mind, and confirmed by his own experience of their
good effect on his productions. For if Art be not the imitator of
Nature, it is still less the copyist of Art. Its base is in the study of
Nature—not to imitate, but first to select, and then to combine, from
Nature those materials into which the artist can breathe his own
vivifying idea; and as the base of Art is in the study of Nature, so its
polish and ornament must be sought by every artist in the study of those
images which the artists before him have already selected, combined, and
vivified; not, in such study, to reproduce a whole that represents
another man’s mind, and can no more be born again than can the man who
created it; but again to select, to separate, to recombine—to go through
the same process in the contemplation of Art which he employed in the
contemplation of Nature; profiting by all details, but grouping them
anew by his own mode of generalisation, and only availing himself of the
minds of others for the purpose of rendering more full and complete the
realisation of that idea of truth or beauty which has its conception in
his own mind. For that can be neither a work of art (in the æsthetic
sense of the word) nor a work of genius in any sense of the word, which
does not do a something that, as a whole, has never been done before;
which no other living man could have done; and which never, to the end
of time, can be done again—no matter how immeasurably better may be the
_other_ things which _other_ men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Childe Harold’
were produced but the other day; yet already it has become as impossible
to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’ or a ‘Childe Harold’ as to reproduce an
‘Iliad.’ A better historical romance than ‘Ivanhoe,’ or a better
contemplative poem than ‘Childe Harold,’ may be written some day or
other; but, in order to be better, it must be totally different. The
more a writer is imitated the less he can be reproduced. No one of our
poets has been so imitated as Pope, not because he is our greatest or
our most fascinating poet, but because he is the one most easily
imitated by a good versifier. But is there a second Pope, or will there
be a second Pope, if our language last ten thousand years longer?
THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART.[3]
When the announcement first appeared that a biography of the late Sir
Howard Douglas was in progress, the impression made upon our minds was
anything but favourable to the enterprise. Of the good and gifted man
himself, as he mixed in general society, our recollections were indeed
of the most pleasurable kind. He stood before us with his kindly manner,
his noble appearance, his high bearing, his generous nature, the perfect
model of what an English officer and gentleman ought to be. And casting
our eyes across the room to the shelf on which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and
‘Military Bridges’ were ranged, we thought of him as a man of science
more than ordinarily well read in his profession. But not all our desire
to find in connection with him materials for a consecutive history,
helped us to any other conclusion than this, that the story of his life,
if told at length, must be a dull one. We acknowledge, less with shame
than with satisfaction and some surprise, that we were quite mistaken.
Sir Howard Douglas’s career had more of romance about it than that of
many a man who has filled a much larger space in the world’s
observation. It was successful as far as it carried him, because a sound
judgment controlled good abilities, and directed them to a wise end.
And, above all, it reads this lesson to coming generations, that he who
honestly seeks the wellbeing of others rarely fails, sooner or later, to
secure his own. Nor must we omit to render to Sir Howard’s biographer
the commendation which he deserves. Mr Fullom has executed his task
well; neither overlaying his narrative with details, which sometimes
weary, nor keeping back anything which might conduce to its
completeness, he has given us one of the pleasantest books which, for
some time past, has come under our notice.
The house of Douglas has from the earliest times been renowned in
Scottish story. Its alliance with the royal family began in the
fourteenth century, when the Lord of Dalkeith took to wife Mary the
fifth daughter of James I. On this same Lord of Dalkeith the earldom of
Morton was not long afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law, James
II. From father to son, or from uncle to nephew, the earldom passed
through twelve generations, and narrowly escaped coming in the
thirteenth to the father of Sir Howard. But Charles Douglas, if he
missed a coronet, won for himself a baronetcy and great distinction as a
British sailor. He it was who, when Arnold and Montgomery besieged
Quebec, forced his squadron through the ice on the St Lawrence and
relieved the place. He it was who first of all constructed a flotilla
for himself, and then swept the Canadian lakes of the rebel gunboats;
and by-and-by, on the 12th of April 1782, he caught, as if by
inspiration, that idea, the application of which enabled Admiral Rodney
to break the enemy’s line, and to save at a critical moment the honour
of the British fleet.
Of this Sir Charles Douglas, Howard was the eldest son by a second
marriage. Sir Charles’s first wife, a foreign lady, had brought him two
sons and a daughter, so that Howard’s prospects, so far as title and
fortune were concerned, could not have been in his infancy very bright:
and they would have been entirely overcast by the early death of his
mother, had not her place been well supplied by a maternal aunt. Under
the roof of this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive Bank, near Musselburgh, the
little fellow grew and prospered, repaying all the tenderness with which
he was reared by his affectionate and gentle disposition, as well as by
his industry and success over his books.
Howard’s brothers both entered the navy. This was natural, and it was
perhaps equally so that Howard should desire to follow their example;
but Sir Charles considered that, if his three sons were all to embrace
the same profession, the chances were that they would only stand in each
other’s way. He gave directions, therefore, that Howard should be
educated for a different walk in life, and the boy ascended in due time
from the charge of the governess to the grammar-school. Yet the child’s
tastes were entirely naval all the while. He built toy ships, and sailed
them on a pond in the garden; he made friends of the fisher-lads and
cabin-boys along the coast, and became so initiated into the mysteries
of their craft that none among them could better manage than he a
fishing-boat or a ship’s yawl. It thus became clear to Sir Charles
Douglas, who visited his sister in 1789, previously to assuming the
command on a foreign station, that nature had designed his youngest son
for a career similar to his own, and he made up his mind to take Howard
with him, and to rate him as a midshipman on board the flag-ship. But
the coveted flag he was never destined to hoist. A sudden illness
carried him off while the guest of his sister, and Howard’s lot was cast
for him in the army.
The Royal Academy at Woolwich was more easily entered in those days than
it is now. A pass examination was, however, required; and young Douglas,
strange to say, in spite of his marked bias for practical mechanics,
failed in the elements of geometry. But he had made so good a figure in
other respects, and appeared so cast down by the circumstance, that the
examiner, Dr Hutton, encouraged him to try again; and three weeks spent
with a clever crammer sufficed to bring him up to the mark. He therefore
presented himself a second time, passed, and was admitted.
There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s history which puts his readers to
considerable inconvenience—he is not very accurate in his dates. We do
not quite make out, for example, when young Douglas made his way into
the Academy, or how long he continued a cadet; but we are told, what is
extremely probable in itself, that he was much beloved by his
contemporaries, and that he soon took the lead among them both in the
playground and in the class-room. His passion for naval affairs
continued as strong as ever, and he indulged it by frequent boat
excursions on the Thames. He swam, also, like a duck, and paid many a
furtive visit to Deptford dockyard, where he studied by fits and starts
the art of shipbuilding. His vacations he spent in Scotland, passing to
and from Leith in one of the smacks;—an intense delight to him, because
he was instructed by the crews in the arts of knotting and splicing, of
plaiting points and gaskets, of making gammets, and heaving the lead. It
is not often that a youth displays such unmistakable aptitude for a
career which he is not destined to follow; and it still more rarely
happens that the amusements of the boy, whom circumstances in after life
place in a groove apparently wide apart from them, turn out to have been
by no means the least useful branches of his education, either to
himself or to others.
After completing his college course, Douglas received a lieutenant’s
commission, and in 1795 assumed the command of a small artillery corps
in the north of England. His headquarters were in Tynemouth Castle, and
he had detachments at Sunderland, Hartlepool, and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
His entire force in gunners fell short of fifty men; yet this was at a
time when the risk of invasion appeared to be imminent, and Douglas and
his gunners were necessarily exposed to bear the brunt of it. The young
lieutenant felt how perfectly inefficient his force was, and cast about
to devise some means of increasing it. He asked first for a
reinforcement of artillerymen, which could not be afforded. He then
suggested to the general officer of the district the propriety of
drilling a portion of his infantry to the great-gun exercise; and
himself, with unwearied diligence, instructed thirty men from each of
the regiments quartered within many miles of Tynemouth. He was not,
however, satisfied even with this—the thought struck him that he might
enlist the sympathies of the fishermen and coasting sailors in the cause
which he had at heart; and having obtained through General Balfour the
sanction of the Government, he invited them to form themselves into
companies of volunteer artillery. Upwards of five hundred fine fellows
answered to the call; and the thoughtful lad had soon the satisfaction
of knowing that danger, if it did come, would not find him unprepared,
and that the merit of having provided a remedy for a great and
acknowledged evil was entirely his own.
It is not to be supposed that the young man was so given up to serious
matters as to turn away from the recreations common to his age and
profession: on the contrary, Douglas seems to have been at Tynemouth the
gayest of the gay. He danced well, rode well, established a yacht in
which he made many adventurous cruises, and won the hearts of young and
old by his frank and graceful manners. But sterner work awaited him, and
the romance of his existence began.
Early in August 1795 he received orders to take charge of a detachment
of troops, which, with women and children, were to proceed from Woolwich
to Quebec. He joined the Phillis transport at Gravesend, and found
himself the senior officer, with six subalterns besides himself on
board. To him the prospect of a voyage across the Atlantic was a
positive delight. What cared he about the inadequacy of accommodation,
or the wretched nature of the food which was then issued to soldiers
embarked? His thoughts were entirely given up to the great object of his
boyish fancy—the actual navigation of a ship out of sight of land, and
all the enterprise and excitement incident thereto. Never neglecting his
own proper duties, he accordingly found time to make himself one of the
crew, and, sharing their labours, and evincing perfect intelligence of
all that was required, he won more than the goodwill, the confidence and
respect of every one on board.
The Phillis was a slow sailer. She encountered various changes of
weather, behaving, upon the whole, tolerably well, though sometimes
uneasy and always uncomfortable. At last, however, a tempest overtook
her about forty leagues to the east of the southern entrance of the Gulf
of St Lawrence, and the sea swept over her decks, knocking the boats
from their fastenings. The gale lasted all that day and throughout the
night; but a lull came in the morning, and the women and children, who
had been kept below, were allowed to come on deck. The same evening the
officers entertained the skipper, and all were rejoicing in the prospect
of escape from danger, when the mate suddenly broke into the cabin and
requested the captain to follow him. Douglas guessed from the manner of
the two men that something must be wrong. He ran up the companion-stair,
and heard—for he could see nothing—the roar of breakers close ahead. The
ship had drifted before the wind, and was already in imminent danger.
Immediately the soldiers were ordered up, and, with their assistance,
the best bower anchor was let go. But though it seemed to check the
vessel for a moment, it soon began to drag; and, with breakers on the
bow, practised eyes discovered that there was land on both quarters—that
the ship was embayed.
It was evident, under such circumstances, that the single chance of
saving the lives of those on board was to force the Phillis, if
possible, round a projecting reef on her lee bow. But this could be done
only by making more sail, and to go aloft at that moment and shake out
reefs was a service of the utmost hazard. The seamen ordered to do so
hung back, whereupon Douglas sprang into the shrouds, and, followed by
two cabin-boys, accomplished the operation. The consequence was that the
Phillis bore up and cleared the point, though very narrowly; but it was
a mere respite from danger. The storm grew more and more tremendous. The
boats could with difficulty be moved, and one of them (the long-boat)
was scarce got over the side ere she went to pieces. The ship was now
upon the rocks, and another boat was lowered chiefly by the exertions of
the soldiers. But she in her turn seemed in danger of being broken to
pieces; whereupon Douglas, followed by two officers, sprang in, hoping
to fend her off from the ship’s side. Already she was more than half
full of water, which compelled the three youths to spring back, in doing
which Douglas missed his footing and fell into the sea. Happily he had
divested himself of most of his clothing, and his skill as a swimmer
stood him in good stead, for he rose upon the top of a wave, and one of
his friends, seizing his collar at the moment, dragged him on to the
deck.
Shipwreck under any circumstances is an awful thing. The wreck of the
Phillis went on, so to speak, through two days and as many nights. Men
and women went overboard; children died from exposure in their mothers’
arms. One poor fellow struck out in despair for the land, and was lost
among the breakers. The first raft which the survivors constructed
carried two of their number to the shore, who, regardless of the fate of
their companions, immediately deserted. A second raft was put together,
and on that Mr Douglas reached the land. He had carried a rope with him,
and began immediately to construct a bridge. Fortunately the wind lulled
at this moment, and the wreck was cleared of its living occupants. But
scarcely was this done ere the Phillis went to pieces without an
opportunity having been afforded of securing the means of subsistence
even for a single day.
The sufferings of these poor people on the barren cliff to which they
escaped were dreadful. Happily the waves brought ashore some pieces of
cloth as well as a cask of wine and a quantity of smoked pork. But the
sailors seized the wine and drank it; and the first night was spent in
cold and misery, for the snow lay deep on the ground, and there was no
fuel with which to make a fire. All lay down and slept—a sleep from
which they would probably never have wakened had not Douglas been roused
by a fearful scream, to which the wife of his servant gave utterance.
She had gone mad from privations and excitement, and died shrieking to
the last, so that her voice was heard over the wind and rain. She had
outlived all the women who went on board at Gravesend, and not a child
survived.
Mr Douglas was at this time barely nineteen years of age, yet such was
the force of his character that all about him, seamen as well as
soldiers, looked to him for instructions. He rescued a second cask of
wine from being broached this time by soldiers, though not without a
struggle. “We are all equals now,” said the leader of the mutineers;
“we’ll take no orders from you or anybody else.” “Won’t you!” cried
Douglas, springing at his throat with a knife; “you are under my
command; and if you don’t obey, by heavens, I’ll kill you!” The man
yielded; the small stock of provisions and wine was secured, and after a
vain attempt to penetrate through the forest, the whole party returned
again to the cliff—there to wait till either help should come from the
sea, or famine do its work and destroy them.
A feeling of despair was beginning to gain the mastery, when one day the
cry was heard, “A sail! a sail!” They had already set up a spar, and
hoisted a piece of cloth upon it; but the object was small, and might
not be discerned from a distance, and then what a fate awaited them! It
was not, however, so ordered. The sail approached; she was a small
schooner trading between St John and Great Jarvis; and the crew gave
back the cheer which the poor castaways raised in their agony, crowding
at the same time to the beach. They were all taken off and carried to
the place whither the schooner was bound, and spent the winter, roughly
but not unhappily, among the honest fishermen who had there established
themselves.
The winter seemed long, the days being very short in that latitude. Not
ungrateful, but tired of the monotony, Douglas purchased a whale-boat,
and, having fitted it with a deck, determined, as soon as the season
should advance a little, to risk a voyage to the West Indies. Several of
his brother officers agreed to share the danger with him, and they got a
St Lawrence pilot and a seaman from Newfoundland to join them. But a
succession of heavy gales hindered them from starting till April was far
spent. At last, just as their preparations were completed, there arrived
in the harbour a schooner bound from Halifax to St John, the commander
of which had heard of their misfortunes, and gone out of his way to
offer them assistance. Adventurous as they were, Douglas and his friends
did not hesitate to abandon their own project, and to avail themselves
of the superior accommodation thus placed at their disposal. They were
accordingly conveyed in the first instance to St John, Mr Douglas doing
seaman’s duty throughout the voyage, and by-and-by to Halifax, whither,
after discharging cargo, the schooner returned.
The Duke of Kent, the father of her present Majesty, was at that time
Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Nova Scotia. He had heard of the fate
of the Phillis, and of the sufferings of the crew and passengers, and
sent an aide-de-camp to request that such of the officers as might be in
a state to be moved, should present themselves at Government House.
Douglas and his friend Mr Forbes obeyed the summons, and were most
kindly treated by the Royal Duke. But their destination was Quebec,
whither, as soon as means of transport could be found, they proceeded.
The reception awarded them there, and especially Mr Douglas, was
gratifying in the extreme. The important services rendered by the father
to the colony had not yet passed out of men’s minds, and they believed
that they saw in the son qualities which proved him worthy of his
parentage. He was taken at once, so to speak, to the hearts of the
people, and had the still higher gratification to find that the
authorities, civil and military, entertained a just appreciation of his
talents, and were determined to make use of them.
There was an alarm of a French fleet hovering near the coast, and not a
single cruiser lay in the St Lawrence. The Governor became anxious, and
having often observed Mr Douglas guiding with remarkable adroitness a
sailing-boat in boisterous weather about the bay, he bethought him that
the nautical skill of the young officer might be applied to better
purposes than those of mere amusement. Douglas was sent for, and asked
if he would be disposed to take command of an armed coaster, and go off
as far as the Banks of Newfoundland in search of the enemy. He accepted
the trust without a moment’s hesitation; and, carrying with him, in
addition to a good crew, artillerymen enough to man his ten guns, he
hoisted his pennant on board a schooner of 250 tons burden, and stood
out to sea. Though never coming up with the French fleet—which, indeed,
had steered in a different direction—he found more than one opportunity
of showing how well qualified he was, under trying circumstances, to
manage a ship of war, and probably to fight her. And many a time in
after life he used to tell the story, adding that, “after all, a naval
life was that for which nature had peculiarly fitted him.”
So passed a year in Lower Canada, at the close of which the roster of
service carried Mr Douglas to Toronto, where he still found vent for his
marine propensities on Lake Ontario. He became likewise a great
sportsman, as well with the gun as with the fishing-rod, and made
frequent incursions into the forests in search of game. This brought him
more than once in contact with the Red men, over whom, by his cool
courage and endurance of fatigue, he acquired a remarkable ascendancy.
Among other circumstances worth noticing was his encounter in the bush
with a young white girl, of surpassing beauty, who had lived among the
Indians from her infancy. He states in his note-book that she had been
carried off by a party of warriors who had ravaged a settlement, and
that they treated her, as she grew up, with the utmost kindness and
respect. “A strange chance discovered her to her brother, and he
entreated her to return home; but she refused, declaring that she was
perfectly happy, and could not support a different existence.”
In the autumn of 1798, tidings reached Mr Douglas of the death of the
elder of his half-brothers. The event rendered necessary his immediate
return to England, and he took a passage in the last ship of the season,
a little brig, timber-laden and bound for Greenock. It seems to have
been his destiny never to go to sea without encountering danger and
difficulty. One night, shortly after clearing the Bay of St Lawrence, Mr
Douglas was awakened by the vessel giving a sudden lurch, for which he
could not account otherwise than by supposing she had struck on some
sunken rock. He jumped out of bed, and, staying only to throw a
greatcoat about him, ran upon deck. A brisk gale was blowing, and the
brig, having got into the trough of the sea, staggered under
single-reefed topsails, main-top-gallant-sails, and jib, and
fore-and-aft main-sail, with the wind on the beam. The mate, whose watch
it was, had got drunk, and gone below, and the helmsman seemed quite at
a loss how to guide the rudder. Douglas saw that there was not a moment
to be lost. He took the command of the ship, called up all hands, issued
with clearness and promptitude orders which were instantly obeyed, and
kept the vessel from foundering. The tumult brought the captain on deck,
who stood by astonished and speechless. No sooner, however, had he
satisfied himself of the untrustworthiness of the mate, than he directed
the vessel to be put about, and would have returned to Quebec had not Mr
Douglas volunteered to do mate’s duty during the remainder of the
passage. There could be no hesitation on the captain’s part, after what
he had just seen, to accede to this proposal: so the brig held her
course, and arrived safe in the Clyde, where, with protestations of
mutual respect and esteem, he and his friendly skipper parted.
Mr Douglas had not been long in Scotland before he fell in love, and
soon afterwards married Miss Anne Dundas, a young lady of great personal
beauty and cultivated mind. He obtained his promotion likewise in 1799;
and having done duty for a while as adjutant of a battalion, he was
subsequently posted to the horse-artillery. But better things than the
command of a troop were in store for him. The military authorities had
established at High Wyckham a cadet school, with a senior department
attached to it, in which officers might be instructed for the Staff; and
General Zamy, an old aide-de-camp of Frederick the Great, being
appointed commandant, it was proposed to Captain Douglas that he should
undertake the superintendence of the Staff College. Captain Douglas was
not unnaturally reluctant to give up the proper line of his profession,
but finding the Duke of York bent upon the arrangement, and being
tempted to accede to it by the offer of a step of rank, he passed from
the artillery into the line as a major, and took the place for which
both his natural talents and acquired information eminently fitted him.
From 1804 up to 1814 Douglas continued to be connected with the
educational department of the army. It would be impossible to
overestimate the importance of the services which he rendered. He not
only instructed candidates for Staff employment by lessons gathered from
the past, but deduced, from his own clear perception of things, hints
and suggestions which were then entirely new. He had many differences
because of this habit with General Zamy, who, like veterans in general,
was slow to believe that the tactics and strategy of his own youth could
be improved upon. But in 1806 the old man retired, and Douglas, with the
rank of lieutenant-colonel, took his place at the head of the
establishment. A fresh impulse was immediately given to the course of
study. Not surveying only, but pontooning, artillery, and the theory of
the whole art of war, were taught, and those brilliant Staff officers
sent out who in the Peninsular struggle gave to the Great Duke such
efficient support. Sir Howard, however—for he had by this time succeeded
by the death of another brother to the baronetcy—yearned for active
employment in the field. He applied for and obtained permission to join
Sir John Moore’s army, which he overtook just as the retreat from
Benevente began; and he shared its fortunes both in the painful marches
which it accomplished, and in the battle near Corunna, which enabled it
to re-embark without dishonour. By-and-by, when the expedition to the
Scheldt was fitted out, Sir Howard prevailed upon the Duke of York to
appoint him to the Staff of Lord Chatham’s army as Deputy
Quartermaster-General. The enterprise grievously failed; and the loss by
disease among the troops and ships’ companies engaged was very severe.
But even under such circumstances Sir Howard proved of great service to
his chief: for having kept a journal of each day’s proceedings as it
occurred, he was able to show, when examined concerning the causes of
the failure, that by far the largest share of blame rested with the
navy, or rather with the officer whom the Admiralty had placed at its
head.
For two years subsequently to his return from Walcheren, Sir Howard led
a quiet and useful life as head of the Military College. In 1811,
however, a fresh opportunity was found for employing him abroad. The
Government of that day put a far higher value on the services of the
Spanish guerillas than they deserved, and were incredulous of Lord
Wellington’s assurances, that on the regular armies of Spain no
dependence could be placed. It seemed to Lord Liverpool and his
colleagues that the Spaniards, if properly armed and supplied, were
capable by their own valour of driving the French beyond the Pyrenees;
and they made choice of Sir Howard Douglas to go among them, because
they believed that he possessed talents and energy enough to awaken them
to a sense of their duty. He received instructions, therefore, towards
the end of July, to proceed without delay to Lord Wellington’s
headquarters, and to arrange with him all details respecting his future
proceedings. Perhaps there is no interval in the long and useful career
of Sir Howard Douglas which afforded him more frequent opportunities of
doing good service to his country than that which, extending over little
more than a year, was spent by him in Spain; but the tale is one which
will not bear condensation.
After conferring with Lord Wellington on the Portuguese frontier, Sir
Howard rode across the country to Oporto, and thence took a passage by
sea to Corunna. He entered there into relations with Spanish juntas,
Spanish generals, and the chiefs of guerilla bands, and found them all,
with the exception of one or two individuals belonging to the latter
class, even more impracticable than he had been led to expect. He gave
them first arms, money, clothing, and had the mortification to learn
that the best battalions and batteries, as soon as they became fit for
war, were shipped off for South America. He turned next to the
irregulars, and succeeded in getting a levy _en masse_ set on foot,
which very much perplexed, and gave constant occupation to, the French
troops scattered over that and the adjoining provinces. But the
circumstance which more than any other affected his own fortunes, was a
combined attack on the fortified convent of St Cintio Rey by Sir Home
Popham’s squadron from the sea, and the guerilla band of Don Gaspar on
shore. It was while watching the effect of the Venerable’s fire that Sir
Howard became struck with the ignorance of the first principles of
gunnery which manifested itself both among officers and men, and that he
conceived the idea of applying, should leisure ever be afforded him, a
proper remedy to the evil. From that idea emanated his first great
treatise, to which the British navy owes so much, and of which the
rulers of the British navy, the Lords of the Admiralty, did not
condescend, for many months after it had been submitted to them, even to
acknowledge the receipt.
There can be no doubt that to Sir Howard’s activity in Galicia the
successful issues of Lord Wellington’s campaign, in the early summer of
1812, were greatly owing. Had he not managed to find employment for two
whole divisions of French infantry, these, with a division of cavalry,
must have joined Marmont’s army; in which case the battle of Salamanca
would have either not been fought at all, or it might have ended less
triumphantly than it did. But no man can work impossibilities; and the
time arrived when, having accomplished the main purpose of his mission,
Sir Howard received orders to return to England. He could not quit the
Peninsula, however, without once again communicating with Lord
Wellington, whom he found just about to undertake the siege of the
Castle of Burgos. To Douglas’s practised eye the place appeared of
immense strength in proportion to the means disposable for its
reduction; and a private reconnaissance led him to conclude that the
whole plan of attack was faulty. In both opinions he stood alone; yet
such was the respect in which his judgment was held, that the chiefs of
artillery and engineers communicated what he had said to Lord
Wellington, and Lord Wellington sent for him. The following is Mr
Fullom’s account of this interview:—“‘Well, Sir Howard, you have
something to say about the siege?’ ‘I think the place is stronger than
we supposed, my Lord.’ ‘Yes, by G—; but our way is to take the hornwork,
and from there breach the wall, and then assault over the two advanced
profiles.’ ‘I would submit to your Lordship whether our means are equal
to such an attack?’ ‘I am not satisfied about our ammunition,’ replied
Lord Wellington. ‘The enemy’s guns are 24-pounders, my Lord, and we have
only three 18-pounders and five 24-pound howitzers. The 18-pounders will
not breach the wall, and our fire must be overpowered, unless your
Lordship brings up some guns from the ships at Santander.’ ‘How would
you do that?’ ‘With draught oxen as far as the mountains, and then drag
them on by hand; we can employ the peasantry, and put a hundred men to a
gun.’ ‘It would take too long.’ ‘I think the place may be captured, with
our present means, from the eastern front, my Lord,’ returned Sir
Howard; and he disclosed his plan, with his reasons for thinking it the
most practicable. Lord Wellington made no remark. Possibly he saw the
defects of his own plan, but it had been deliberately adopted, and he
was not convinced that it ought to be abandoned.”
Mr Fullom has not told this anecdote quite correctly. Sir Howard was
more closely questioned as to the mode of conveyance for the guns, and
answered more pertinently, than is here set down. He suggested that the
24-pounders should be dismounted, the guns placed in the boles of trees
hollowed out, and the carriages run forward by themselves. Thus the
narrowest track through woods and round rocks would suffice for the
conveyance of the former, while the latter, being comparatively light,
would offer no formidable resistance wherever men or bullocks could
travel. Lord Wellington, however, adhered to his own plan, and sustained
the only reverse which marks the progress of an experience in war
extending wellnigh over a quarter of a century. It is just towards both
parties to observe, that the baffled hero was too magnanimous not to
acknowledge his error. “Douglas was right,” he exclaimed, as he mounted
his horse to begin the retreat; “he was the only man who told me the
truth.”
Sir Howard returned to England, and there resumed his occupations as a
military instructor; but his mind was full of a project for forcing
attention to gunnery on the chiefs of the navy; and the disastrous
results of the first frigate-actions in the American war not a little
quickened his zeal. He had a more herculean task before him, however,
than he himself imagined. Strange to say, his disinclination to the
study of pure mathematics had never been overcome; and now he found
himself obliged to master all the arcana of the science, so far as these
had any relation to the movement of a vessel through water under all
possible contingencies. While pursuing these studies he effected such
improvements in the reflecting circle and semicircle for land and marine
surveying as attracted the attention of the Royal Society, which
immediately elected him a member; and then he gave himself up steadily
to the object for which all this abstruse study had been only the
preparation. He produced a treatise in which every point connected with
the theory and practice of artillery was handled. He discussed not only
the power and range of various kinds of ordnance, with the uses of their
several parts, and the effects of transit, windage, recoil, and
suchlike, but he explained how a school of naval gunnery could be
established, and submitted the whole in MS. for the consideration of the
Lords of the Admiralty. Weeks and months passed by, however, without
bringing him so much as a written acknowledgment of its receipt; and
then, and not till then, he wrote privately to his friend Sir Graham
Moore. Sir Graham made such apology as the case would admit of, and did
his best to fix upon the subject the attention of his colleagues; but a
year elapsed before any decided steps were taken. At last the scheme was
adopted; and in 1819, Sir Howard, having first of all obtained the
sanction of the Government, gave his valuable treatise to the world. It
attracted at once the attention of scientific men both at home and
abroad, and led to frequent correspondence between the author and all
persons capable of appreciating and taking an interest in so important a
matter.
Promoted to the rank of Major-General, Sir Howard was nominated in 1824
to the Governorship of New Brunswick, and to the command of the troops
stationed there, and in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island,
Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Mr Fullom tells an amusing story of Sir
Howard being met on the pier at Halifax by Mr Justice Haliburton, which
fails in this respect, that it happens unfortunately not to be accurate.
It was not Sam Slick, but his cousin of the same name, who in 1796 had
served in the Fusiliers, and in 1824 greeted his old comrade as Governor
of New Brunswick. But there is so much of _vraisemblance_ in the matter,
that the anecdote may very well remain where it is. On the other hand,
Mr Fullom’s narrative of Sir Howard’s administration of the province is
not only correct to the letter, but extremely interesting. It came to
pass while he was there that one of those fires occurred, of the
appalling effects of which we in this old world of Europe can form no
conception. It was an unusually dry summer, the third of a succession of
such, when first in the town, and by-and-by far off in the forest,
flames suddenly broke out. Government House was the first to be burned
down; then whole streets ignited at once; and just as a line began to be
drawn between what remained of the town and the ashes of dwellings
consumed, a lurid glare, seen afar off, gave warning that even a worse
calamity was in progress.
“Several days elapsed before the fire subsided, and then it became
masked by a smoke which darkened the whole country. But night proved
that it had not burned out; for showers of flame shot up at intervals,
and trees stood glaring in the dark, while the mingled black and red
of the sky seemed its embers overhead. Thus a week passed, when Sir
Howard determined to penetrate the forest, and visit the different
settlements. A friend has described his parting with Lady Douglas and
his daughters, whose pale faces betrayed their emotion, though they
forbore to oppose his design, knowing that nothing would keep him from
his duty. But this was not understood by others, and the gentlemen of
the town gathered round his rough country waggon at the door, and
entreated him to wait a few days, pointing to the mountains of smoke,
and declaring that he must be suffocated if he escaped being burned.
He thanked them for their good feeling, grasped their hands, and
mounted the waggon. It dashed off at a gallop, and wondering eyes
followed it to the woods, where it disappeared in the smoke.
“The devastation he met exceeded his worst fears; for the settlements
he went to visit no longer existed. The fire seems to have burst in
every quarter at once; for it broke out at Miramichi the same moment
as at Fredericktown, though one hundred and fifty miles lay between.
But here its aspect was even more dreadful, and its ravages more
appalling, as Miramichi stood in the forest completely girt round
except where escape was shut off by the river. Many were in bed when
they heard the alarm; many were first startled by the flames, or were
suffocated in their sleep, leaving no vestige but charred bones;
others leaped from roof or window, and rushed into the forest, not
knowing where they went, or took fire in the street, and blazed up
like torches. A number succeeded in gaining the river, and threw
themselves in boats or on planks, and pushed off from the banks, which
the fire had almost reached, and where it presently raged as fiercely
as in the town. One woman was aroused from sleep by the screams of her
children, whom she found in flames, and caught fire herself as she
snatched up an infant and ran into the river, where mother and child
perished together. Then came the hurricane, tearing up burning trees
and whirling them aloft, lashing the river and channel to fury, and
snapping the anchors of the ships, which flew before it like chaff,
dashing on the rocks, and covering the waves with wreck. Blazing trees
lighted on two large vessels, and they fired like mines, consuming on
the water, which became so hot in the shallows that large salmon and
other fish leaped on shore, and were afterwards found dead in heaps
along the banks of the river. What can be said of such horrors,
combining a conflagration of one thousand miles with storm and
shipwreck, and surprising a solitary community at midnight? Happily
the greater number contrived to reach Chatham by the river; but
floating corpses showed how many perished in the attempt, and nearly
three hundred lost their lives by fire or drowning.”
No small portion of Sir Howard’s time henceforth was spent in devising
means for the relief of the unfortunate people whom this calamity had
ruined. He made strong appeals to the benevolence of the British public,
which were not disregarded, and he advanced from his own funds more than
he could well spare. Nor was he inattentive to other matters. He made a
voyage from harbour to harbour throughout the extent of his military
command, and, with his usual luck, twice narrowly escaped shipwreck.
Indeed, so completely was his name up as a Jonah, that the captain of
the Niemen frigate, with whom he had been a passenger, took the alarm.
“The following day” (the day after one of these mishaps) “brought
Captain Wallace to dine with the Governor, and it came out that he had
been hearing tales about his Excellency which he did not consider to
his advantage, for he suddenly asked him if he had not once been
shipwrecked. Sir Howard replied by telling the story, and the
captain’s face became longer as he proceeded, though he made no remark
till the close. He then observed that his regard for him was very
great, and he valued their interchange of hospitality in port and
ashore, but should never like to take him to sea again; for he had
been twenty years afloat without mishap, except on the two occasions
when they had been together; and he should now look upon his
appearance in his ship as a passenger as a very bad omen indeed.”
On both occasions the ship had struck for lack of proper beacons, and
Sir Howard at once applied the remedy. He caused lighthouses to be built
where they were most required; and in order to improve the internal
communications of the province, he made roads, and proposed a plan for
connecting by a canal the Bay of Fundy with the Gulf of St Lawrence.
Meanwhile he was not neglectful of the intellectual wants of the
colonists, as yet very imperfectly attended to. He founded, endowed,
and, after a good deal of opposition, obtained a charter for the
University of Fredericktown, of which, in 1829, he became the first
Chancellor, giving at the same time his own name to the College. These
were works of peace; and he was equally careful in guarding against the
chances of war. The treaty of 1783 had left the boundary-line between
Great Britain and the United States very imperfectly defined; and as the
inhabitants of the latter country increased in number, they began to
encroach on the territories of the former. A good many squatters had
forced themselves into New Brunswick, and been driven away, till at last
a person named Baker, bolder than the rest, took possession of an
outlying portion of land, and hoisted the American standard. The
proceeding was much approved by the Government of Maine, and strong
parties of the militia were turned out in anticipation of a collision
with the garrison of Fredericktown.
Sir Howard Douglas, however, knew better than to precipitate
hostilities. He contented himself with sending a civil message to Baker,
requesting him to withdraw; and when no attention was paid to it, he
gave such orders to the troops as would bring them to the frontier in a
few hours should their presence be required. This done, a parish
constable was desired to perform his duty; and the man, coming upon
Baker without any fuss or parade, cut down the flag-staff, seized the
squatter, and carried him off in a waggon to the capital of the
province. All Maine was thrown into a ferment. The Governor threatened,
and demanded that Baker should be set at liberty. Sir Howard refused so
much as to see the messenger intrusted with this demand, justly alleging
that he could hold communication on such subjects only with the Central
Government at Washington. The result was, that Baker, being put upon his
trial, was found guilty, and sentenced to pay a fine; which fine, after
an enormous amount of bluster, was duly paid. For his firm yet judicious
conduct throughout this awkward affair Sir Howard received the
approbation of the Home Government, becoming at the same time more than
ever an object of enthusiastic admiration to the people whom he
governed.
While approving all that their representative had done, the British
Government saw that it would be impossible with safety to leave the
boundary question longer unsettled. Arrangements were accordingly made
with the United States for referring the points at issue to arbitration;
and the King of the Netherlands being accepted as arbitrator, Sir Howard
was requested to return to Europe, and to watch proceedings. The King’s
decision gave, however, little satisfaction to either party. England,
indeed, would have acquiesced in it, though feeling herself wronged; but
America failed to get all that she coveted, and refused to be bound. It
remained for her, by sharp practice at a future period, to gain her end;
and for England, under the management of Lord Ashburton and Sir Robert
Peel, to be made a fool of. The part played by Sir Howard Douglas during
the progress of this negotiation was every way worthy of his high
reputation; but that which strikes us most is the sagacity with which,
so early as 1828, he foretold events in the States themselves, which
have since come to pass. In a paper addressed to the Secretary for the
Colonies, which points out endless grounds of quarrel between the
Federal Government and the Governments of the several States, he thus
expresses himself:—
“Here we may see the manner in which the Union will be dissolved—viz.,
the secession of any State which, considering its interest, property,
or jurisdiction menaced, may no longer choose to send deputies to
Congress. This is a great defect in the Bond of Union, which has not,
perhaps, been very generally noticed, cloaked as it is under article
1st, section 5th of the Constitution, which states ‘that where there
are not present, of either House, members sufficient to form a quorum
to do business, a smaller number may be authorised, for the purpose of
forming one, to compel the attendance of absent members.’ But this
appears only to be authorised for the purpose of forming a quorum, and
only extends over members actually sworn in, who, being delegated to
Congress by the States they represent, are subjected to whatever rules
of proceeding and penalties each House may provide, with the
concurrence of two-thirds of its members. But there is nothing
obligatory upon the several ‘Sovereign States’ to send members to
Congress, or to prevent those sent from being withdrawn. The
‘Sovereign States’ have never bound themselves to do either; so that
the process of dissolution in this way is very simple, and the danger
imminent of a separation being thus effected, whenever the interests
of any particular State or States are touched by the Government, or
brought into discussion in Congress, although those interests may be
outvoted by the preponderating influence of other States having
different interests. But the State or States which are to suffer will
not, it is clear, send members to vote their own injury or ruin; and
it may safely be pronounced, from what I have shown in this paper,
that this is the manner in which the American Union will come to a
natural death.”
Sir Howard returned to England from the Hague, to find the Government
bent on equalising the duties on foreign and colonial timber, and
thereby depriving the people of New Brunswick of one of the most
lucrative branches of their trade. He could not sit still and see done
what he himself regarded as an act of great injustice. He made immense
exertions, therefore, personally and through the press, to defeat the
Ministerial measure, and he succeeded. It was impossible, under such
circumstances, to return to New Brunswick, and he therefore resigned the
government. Not even their satisfaction at the victory which he had
achieved for them could reconcile the New Brunswickers to the loss of
their Governor; and they marked their gratitude for all that he had done
by presenting him with a magnificent service of plate. Indeed, it is
very touching to remember how, up to the latest day of his life, every
person connected with New Brunswick, on visiting England, sought him out
as if he had been a private friend, and laid open to him matters, not of
public only, but of private business. The Whig Ministers, on the other
hand, naturally piqued at their defeat, left him for four years without
any employment. Hence it was not till 1835, when Sir Robert Peel acceded
to office, that Sir Howard received the appointment of Lord High
Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. It was again his fate to be mixed up
with calamities brought on by natural causes, and with political
difficulties of no common order. There arrived one day from Ireland, at
Government House, a Right Rev. Dr Hynes, a _protégé_ of Daniel
O’Connell, who introduced himself to Sir Howard as Bishop of Corfu, and
handed him a letter from Lord Glenelg, at that time Colonial Secretary.
“‘You seem not to be aware that there is already a Bishop in Corfu,’
remarked Sir Howard. Dr Hynes intimated that he was a Catholic Bishop
appointed by the Pope. ‘I know of but one Bishop here, sir,’ replied
Sir Howard, ‘and no other could be recognised.’ Dr Hynes remonstrated,
and pointed out the importance to England of the Roman Catholic
interest in the islands; but Sir Howard could not be persuaded that
the British Government was not strong enough to hold its ground
without this bulwark. The prelate appealed to the letter of the
Minister of the Colonies, but was shown that this was no recognition,
nor could such be given without the sanction of the Ionian Senate. He
declared he would assume his functions, and abide the consequences;
but met a firmness surpassing his own, and learned that he would not
be permitted to remain on the island. He denied that he could be
expelled, and warned the Lord High Commissioner that his conduct must
be answered in England. ‘I have only to say,’ was the reply, ‘that you
will be removed by the police if you are not gone within twenty-four
hours.’”
The Bishop was unable to resist such an argument as this, and Papal
aggression received a temporary check in Corfu. But Sir Howard had
another battle to fight, and he fought it to a successful issue.
Wherever he exercised authority, his great object seems to have been to
promote the physical and moral wellbeing of society, and he applied
himself with this view to compile a sound code of laws for the Ionians.
Nothing could be more offensive to those who profited by bad laws; and
the priests in particular, set on by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as
he was set on by Russia, offered all the opposition in their power. Sir
Howard’s mode of defeating this move of the Hellenistic faction proved
at once novel and effective. He waited till the preparations for revolt
(for open revolt was meditated) were complete; and then surrounded the
house where the chief conspirators sat, arrested them all, and took
possession of papers which placed the complicity of the Patriarch beyond
doubt. These he sent to the British Minister at Constantinople, who
obtained without difficulty the deposition of the Patriarch, and the
setting up of a successor less disposed to become a tool in the hands of
Russia.
Of the great earthquake which shook Zante to its centre the memory will
not soon pass away. It began just as Sir Howard entered the harbour on
one of his tours of inspection, and continued, with shocks recurring at
narrow intervals, for a whole fortnight. The people, paralysed with
terror, knew not what to do, or whither to betake themselves, till the
Lord High Commissioner appeared among them, calm and collected. He gave
the necessary orders for extricating the wounded from the ruins: he
directed men, women, and children where to go; caused temporary barracks
to be erected for their shelter; and appeared to them as a guardian
angel in their hour of need. His good offices on that occasion, as well
as a brief experience of the working of his laws, brought about a
thorough change of opinion both with regard to them and to him. When he
resigned his office, which he was obliged to do in consequence of the
not very generous conduct towards him of Lord John Russell, then
Colonial Secretary, he left scarce one enemy in the island, and had the
honour of having an obelisk erected to him, by vote of the Senate,
bearing this inscription: “Howard Douglas, Cavalier, and General, High
Commissioner, Benefactor of the Ionian Islands.”
Sir Howard sat in Parliament for Liverpool during Sir Robert Peel’s last
administration, and spoke and voted on all occasions like a sound yet
thoughtful Conservative. In 1847 he retired from the House of Commons,
and thenceforth applied his energies to the service of the country as a
writer on professional and scientific subjects. His treatise on ‘Naval
Gunnery’ had already gone through several editions, as did his volume on
‘Fortification;’ and he now compiled and published his ‘Military
Bridges,’ perhaps the most generally interesting, if not the most
important, of all his works. But it was not thus alone that he continued
to be useful. His opinions were sought and freely given to each
successive Government on every question connected with the improvement
of arms, the selection of points to be fortified, the management of the
navy, and the steps to be taken for putting the country in a state of
defence. It is extremely interesting to know that, like the great Duke
of Wellington, Sir Howard laid aside all party feeling whenever the
honour or interests of the country came to be considered; and that he
possessed, as he deserved, the entire confidence of Whigs not less than
of Tories. His opinions as to the relative value of iron and wooden
ships are well known; he was entirely opposed to the former, though he
did not object to the process of casing the latter with mail; while in
his ‘Naval Warfare with Steam’ he advocated a system of tactics which
should bring the management of fleets very much into the same category
with the management of armies in the day of battle.
Thus, honoured and beloved, Sir Howard grew old, without losing one jot
of the elasticity of spirit which had characterised him in earlier days.
He was very happy also in his family till death began to cut it short,
and blow after blow fell so heavily, that, brave as he was, he sometimes
reeled. In 1854 a grandson, the bearer of his own name, died; then came
tidings of the decease of his eldest son, Charles, far away; then his
second son left him; then two of his daughters, Mrs Harcourt and Mrs
Murray Gartshore. The loss of Mrs Gartshore affected him very deeply;
and well it might, for she was one of those gifted and beautiful
creatures who shed light around them wherever they go, seeming too pure
and noble for earth. And scarcely were his tears dry when Lady Douglas,
his companion for fifty-seven years, followed her daughters. Two
daughters and one son alone remained to him, and one of these daughters
was a widow; the other kept his house, and was, indeed, everything to
him. But she likewise was taken from him, in a manner as trying as could
be to his Christian patience and courage. She had been in apparent
health and cheerful with him at dinner one day, and next morning was
found dead in her bed. If the old man’s head had fallen into the dust,
who could have wondered? But it did not. “No one can tell,” he observed
to Mr Bateman, the medical gentleman who was called in, “what a loss she
is to me: she has devoted herself to me; but I must do what is to be
done. She will sleep beside her mother, where I will soon join them.”
In this manner the sun went gradually down till it sank beneath the
horizon. Not that he suffered himself to be unmanned by sorrow; quite
otherwise. But the physical frame felt the shock, and yielded to it
perceptibly.
“Sir Howard enjoyed excellent health up to Miss Douglas’s death. All
his teeth were sound; he walked three or four miles a-day, and
obtained eight hours’ sleep at night. But that event gave his system a
shock, and the controversy about armour-ships wore it more, showing
his friends a marked change. His sleep was less regular and composed,
and he frequently recited the lines of our great poet—
‘Oh, sleep! oh, gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamours in the slippery clouds,
That with the hurly death itself awakes.’
“But he hid his sorrows, appearing calm and cheerful, though his
manner was subdued and his conversation less animated. His vivacity
revived at times, particularly when he spoke of Scotland, the theme he
liked best; or when he recalled his early life in America, and
described the pathless forests, the villages of wigwams, or the falls
of Niagara, reciting Thomson’s lines—
‘Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood
Rolls fair and placid,’ &c.
“He derived little benefit from the Folkstone breezes on his last
visit, though enjoying his walks on the promenade, which he pronounced
the noblest platform in Europe. Its attractions were just to his
taste, for he could here see the coast of France, against which he had
raised such bulwarks, watch the yachts and shipping in harbour and
Channel, and glance around at the military strollers. Shorncliff Camp
was within reach, as well as the Military School at Hythe, in which he
took great interest, highly appreciating General Hay. He supported the
Volunteer movement, and aided in its organisation, addressing a letter
of advice to the National Rifle Association through his friend General
Hay, and receiving an acknowledgment in his election as an honorary
member. So well did he keep abreast with the age. He showed the same
interest in the movements at the Camp, and attended any display,
though not always to commend. He particularly censured a sham fight,
representing an attack on an enemy who had landed in a bay near Hythe.
The troops were marched down, and skirmishers thrown out on the beach,
when the whole body fell back on the heights, holding them to cover
their retreat. ‘What an absurd proceeding!’ remarked Sir Howard to Mr
Bateman, who was by his side; ‘the movement ought to be exactly
reversed. They should have brought down every man and gun as quickly
as possible if the enemy had landed, and attacked him, and driven him
into the sea. There would be some sense in that.’
“Sir Howard looked a soldier to the last, retaining his erect bearing,
and walking with a firm step, though cautiously, and with looks bent
on the ground. His sight had begun to fail, and cataracts were forming
on both his eyes, but he did not submit them to medical treatment.
‘They will last my time,’ he remarked to the author. He contrived to
write by never raising his pen, forming the letters by habit, and all
were plain to one acquainted with his hand. A career of threescore
years and ten left his character much what it first appeared, with all
its elements of dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and perception,
its habits of industry, its generous instincts, and its warm
sympathies. Neither heart nor mind showed the wear of life, and he is
the same at eighty-five as at seventeen; inspiring the Volunteers at
Hythe as he inspired them at Tynemouth, and exercising the inventive
genius which scared the rats in improving the screw propeller. The
hand that caught up the child in the shipwreck, obeyed the same
impulse still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking up the street at
Folkstone with a loaded basket which he had taken from a poor little
girl. ‘My dear, give that to me,’ he said, as he saw her bending under
the weight; ‘I am better able to carry it than you.’ The words were
reported by a lady who heard them in passing, as the General of
eighty-five and the poor child of five walked away together.”
We are not going to draw an elaborate character of one whose life may be
said to have formed his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas needs no panegyrist
to tell the world what he was. Chivalrous, truthful, high-minded, brave,
he secured the esteem, not less than he commanded the respect, of all
who approached him. Had circumstances so ordered it that he had ever
directed the movement of troops in the field, we take it upon us to say,
that among English generals few would have attained to higher eminence
than he. As it was, he did more for the British army, and navy too, in
his books and by his teaching, than either army or navy, or the heads of
both branches of the service, have ever had the grace to acknowledge. To
these more shining qualities of head and temperament he added the faith
and humility of a Christian man: a humility which was far too real to be
obtruded on careless observers; a faith which had not one shade of
hypocrisy or fanaticism about it. Rest to his noble spirit! it will be
long before we look upon his like again.
ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE.
Terrorism, in one shape or other, is the bane of Italy. By a system of
organised terrorism the princes of Italy have governed their states, and
by means of terror the peoples have replied to their rulers. From the
wide diffusion of this sentiment throughout the nation, secret societies
took their root in the land, and men became banded together for attack,
protection, resistance, or revenge. There was none so high in character
or so elevated by station that he might not be denounced; there was not
one so degraded that he might not be associated with the secret acts of
the Government. The only idea of rule was through the instrumentality of
a secret police. All were suspected—all were watched. The report of the
secretary was entertained as to the character and the acts of the
minister, and the secretary was himself under the close inspection of
some underling in his office. The work of the State went on under the
assumption that no man was honest; and it was really curious to see how
all the complicated questions of a Government could be dealt with by a
system whose first principle was that there was no truth anywhere. It
impaired nothing of a man’s position or influence that he was known to
take bribes. Corruption was the rule, from the star-covered courtier
beside the throne, down to the half-naked lazzarone on the Mole. “Take
care of your pockets, gentlemen, there’s a minister coming,” was the
decorous pleasantry of King Ferdinand at one of his last receptions, and
the speech had a significance which all could appreciate. It was
especially in Southern Italy that this corruption prevailed the most.
Amongst a race long enervated and demoralised, the work of Government
went easily on by means of such agency. The great efforts of the rulers
were directed, not to repress crimes against property and offences
against society, but to meet political disaffection and discontent. The
noted thief would be leniently dealt with, while the Liberal journalist
would be sentenced to the ergastolo. Assassination and robbery went on
increasing, and none seemed to feel terrified; while the imprisonment of
one man for some expression of Liberal opinions, or some half-implied
censure of the Government, was sure to strike terror into many a heart.
The “Government” was, in fact, very little else than an organised
conspiracy against the spread of all civilisation. Its efforts were
directed to keeping the people in a degraded ignorance—the slaves of
priestly superstition, thinking little of the present and utterly
regardless about the future. The Neapolitan temperament was well suited
for such a system. Caring wonderfully little how life was sustained, so
that no labour was exacted for its maintenance,—light-hearted, even to
recklessness—indifferent to almost all privations,—such a people were
neither subject to the same fears nor stirred by the same hopes as the
Northern Italian. They asked, in fact, for little beyond the permission
to exist. Discontent, in its political significance, had no place among
them; they had never heard of any better liberty than idleness, and if
they had, they could not have prized it. With natural acuteness,
however, they saw the corruption that surrounded them—how the minister
took bribes from the contractor, and how the contractor cheated the
State—how the customs officer was bribed by the smuggler, and how the
first merchants of the capital filled their warehouses with contraband
goods. They saw that no man’s integrity ever interfered to his
disadvantage, but that self-interest was the mainspring of every action;
and could a people so acute to learn be slow to profit by the lesson
they acquired? Out of this system of terror, for it was and is a system,
grew two institutions in Southern Italy—Brigandage and the Camorra. The
former of these asserted its influence over the country at large; the
latter, which was an “organised blackmail,” limited its operations to
towns and cities. Brigandage is no new pestilence in Italy; it has
existed for centuries. From the character of the country, so difficult
to travel and so interlaced with cross paths only known to the
inhabitants, all pursuit of these robbers has been rendered difficult;
but besides this, another and far greater obstacle has presented itself
in the sympathy of the peasantry, who, partly from affection and partly
from fear, have always taken part with the brigands to protect or to
conceal them. The same disposition of the country people to side with
those who break the law that we see every day in Ireland, is
recognisable here. Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never
regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in
its severity and in its penalties—they have never had recourse to it for
protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the
exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man;
they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of
commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage
chivalry, the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of
the South. Their lives were full of marvellous adventures, of terrible
incidents and hairbreadth escapes, sure to excite interest in the minds
of an uneducated and imaginative race, who grew to regard the relators
in the light of heroes. Nor did the Church itself scruple to accept the
ill-gotten gains of the highwayman: and the costly robe of the Virgin,
and the rich gems that decked her shrine, have often and often displayed
the spoils that have been torn from the luckless traveller.
In this mixture of religious superstition with a defiance of all human
law, we see again a resemblance between the Italian and the Irishman,
whose traits have indeed an almost unerring similarity in everything.
That “wild justice” of which the great Irish rhetorician once spoke, is
the rule of each. Assuming that society has formed a pact against them,
they have taken up arms in their own defence; and whether it be the
landlord or the traveller, it matters little who shall pay the penalty.
It is next to impossible to deal with crime where the general sentiment
favours the criminal. The boasted immunity of the policeman in England
is but another name for the ascendancy of the law. How comes it
otherwise that one man armed with a mere truncheon dares to arrest a
thief in the midst of his accomplices and associates, while we see in
Italy ninety thousand soldiers unable to repress Brigandage in two
provinces of the South, where the number of the brigands is set down as
four hundred? Such in substance is the report lately furnished to the
Chamber of Deputies at Turin by the order of General Lamarmora. The
forces for the repression of Brigandage amount to ninety thousand
well-armed and well-disciplined soldiers, and the enemy are stated as
four hundred half-naked and scarcely armed wretches, as destitute of
courage as of food. Such is the picture given of them; and we are left
in utter astonishment to guess why, with such a disparity of numbers,
the curse of Brigandage should yet be known in the land.
Why cannot ninety thousand deal with four hundred, even were the cause
at issue less one of equity and justice? If, as has often been asserted,
the Brigandage has been fed from Rome—if the gold of Francis II. and the
blessing of the Pope go with those who cross the frontier to maintain
the disturbance in Southern Italy—what should be easier, with such a
superiority of numbers, than to cut off the communication? With sixty
thousand men a cordon could be drawn from the Mediterranean to the
Adriatic in which each sentinel could hail his neighbour. Were the
difficulty to lie here, could it not be met at once? It was declared a
few weeks back by Mr Odo Russell, that a whole regiment, armed and
clothed in some resemblance to French soldiers, passed over to the
south; and we are lost in amazement why such resources should be
available in the face of an army greater than Wellington ever led in
Spain or conquered with at Waterloo. To understand a problem so
difficult, it is first of all necessary to bear in mind that this same
Brigandage is neither what the friends of the Bourbons nor what the
advocates of united Italy have pronounced it. If the Basilicata and the
Capitanata are very far from being La Vendée, they are also unlike what
the friends of Piedmontism would declare—countries well affected to the
House of Savoy under the temporary dominion of a lawless and bloody
tyranny from which they are utterly powerless to free themselves. If
Brigandage is not in its essence a movement of the reactionists, it has
nevertheless been seized upon by them to prosecute their plans and
favour their designs. To render the Neapolitan States ungovernable—to
exhibit to the eyes of Europe a vast country in a state of
disorganisation, where the most frightful cruelties are daily
practised—where horrors that even war is free from are hourly
perpetrated—was a stroke of policy of which the friends of the late
dynasty were not slow to avail themselves. By this they could contrast
the rule of the present Government with that of the former ones; and
while the press of Europe still rang with the cruelties of the Bourbons,
they could ask, Where is the happy change that you speak of? Is it in
the proclamations of General Pinelli—the burning of villages, and the
indiscriminate slaughter of their inhabitants? Do the edicts which
forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell
of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a
mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily
read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand
chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a
spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of
your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and
the world at large listens favourably to your claims. But why, if it be
true, have the last two years counted more massacres than the forty
which have preceded them? Why are thousands wandering homeless and
shelterless through the mountains, while the ruins of their dwellings
are yet smoking from the ruthless depredations of your soldiery? If
Brigandage numbers but four hundred followers, why are such wholesale
cruelties resorted to? The simple fact is this: the Brigandage of
Southern Italy is not a question of four hundred, or four thousand, or
four hundred thousand followers, but of a whole people utterly
brutalised and demoralised, who, whatever peril they attach to crime,
attach no shame or disgrace to it. The labourers on one of the Southern
Italian lines almost to a man disappeared from work, and on their return
to it, some days after, frankly confessed they had spent the interval
with the brigands. They were not robbers by profession nor from habit;
but they saw no ignominy in lending themselves to an incidental massacre
and bloodshed. The National Guards of the different villages, and the
Syndics themselves, are frequently charged with a want of energy and
determination; but the truth is, these very people are the very support
and mainspring of Brigandage. The brigands are the brothers, the sons,
or the cousins of those who affect to move against them. So far from
feeling the Piedmontese horror of the brigand, these men are rather
irritated by the discipline that bands them against him. They have none
of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being
a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the
master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the
presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To
_them_ the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory.
Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a
something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. Under the
Bourbons the brigand met a very different measure, as he did under the
French rule, and in the time of Murat. Men of the most atrocious lives,
stained with many and cruel murders, were admitted to treat with the
Government, and the negotiations were carried on as formally as between
equals. When a Capo Briganti desired to abandon his lawless and perilous
life, he had but to intimate his wish to some one in authority. His full
conditions might not at first or all be acceded to, but he was sure to
be met with every facility for his wish; and in more than one case was
such a man employed in a situation of trust by the State; and there yet
lives one, Geosaphat Talarico, who has for years enjoyed a Government
pension as the reward of his submission and reformation.
Under the old Bourbon rule, all might be pardoned, except an offence
against the throne. To the political criminal alone no grace could be
extended. The people saw this, and were not slow to apply the lesson.
Let it also be borne in mind, that the brigand himself often met a very
different appreciation from those who knew him personally to that he
received at the hands of the State. The assassin denounced in wordy
proclamations, and for whose head a price was offered, was in his native
village a “gran’ Galantuomo,” who had done scores of fine and generous
actions.
To revolutionise feeling in such a matter is not an easy task. Let any
one, for instance, fashion to his mind how he would proceed to turn the
sympathies of the Irish peasant against the Rockite and in favour of the
landlord, to hunt down the criminal and to favour his victim. It would
be a similar task to endeavour to dispose the peasant of the Abruzzi to
look unfavourably on Brigandage. Brigandage was, in fact, but another
exercise of that terrorism which they saw universally around them. Was
the Capo Briganti more cruel than the tax-gatherer? was he not often
more merciful? and did he ever press upon the poor? Were not his
exactions solely from the rich? Was he not generous, too, when he was
full-handed? How many a benevolent action could be recorded to his
credit! If this great Government, which talked so largely of its
enlightenment, really wished to benefit the people, why did it not
lighten the imposts, cheapen bread, and diminish the conscription?
instead of which we had the taxes quadrupled, food at famine prices, and
the levies for the services more oppressive than ever. They denounced
Brigandage; but there were evils far worse than Brigandage, which, after
all, only pressed a little heavily on the rich, and took from them what
they could spare well and easily.
It is thus the Neapolitan reasons and speaks of that pestilence which is
now eating like a cancer into the very heart of his country, and taxing
the last energy of her wisest and best to meet with success. At this
moment Southern Italy is no more under the control of the Italian
Government than are the States of the Confederacy under the sway of
President Lincoln, and all the powerful energies of the North are
ineffectual to eradicate a disease which is not on the surface, but in
the very heart of the people.
The Italian Brigand, like the Irish Rockite, is by no means of necessity
the most depraved or most wicked of his native village. Perhaps his
fearlessness is his strongest characteristic. He is in other respects
pretty much like those around him. He has no great respect for laws,
which he has often seen very corruptly administered. He has been
familiar with perjury all his life. He has never seen the rites of the
Church denied to the blackest criminals, and he has come to believe
that, except in the accidents of station, men are almost alike, and the
great difference is, that the filchings of the minister are less
personally hazardous than the spoils of the highwayman.
That these men take pay and accept service from the Bourbonist is easy
enough to conceive. To cry Viva Francesco Secondo, when they stop the
diligence or pillage a farmhouse, is no difficult task; but that they
are in any sense followers, or care for the King or his cause, is
utterly and ridiculously untrue. The reactionists affect to believe so,
for it gives them the pretext of a party. The French like to believe so,
for it proclaims, what the press continues unceasingly to assert, that
the North has no footing in the South, and that no sympathy ever has
existed, or ever will exist, between peoples so totally and essentially
dissimilar.
The Piedmontese, too, unwilling to own that the event they have so
ineffectually struggled against has not all the force of a great
political scheme, declare that the Brigandage is fed from Rome, and
would not have a day’s existence, if the ex-King were compelled to leave
that capital, and the favour of the Papal Court withdrawn from its
support.
That the present rulers of Italy pursue the brigands with an energy, and
punish them with a severity never practised before, is cause even to
prefer the reign of the Bourbons to that of the Piedmontese. There is no
need for them to enter upon the difficult questions of freedom and
individual liberty, to contrast the rights enjoyed under one government
with those available under another. It is quite sufficient that they see
what was once tolerated will no longer be endured, and that the robber
chief who once gave the law to the district he lived in is now hunted
down with the remorseless severity that will only be satisfied with his
extermination.
It may be asked, How could the people feel any sympathy for a system
from which they were such heavy sufferers, or look unfavourably on those
who came to rid them of the infliction? The answer is, that long use and
habit, a sense of terror ingrained in their natures, and, not less than
these, a reliance in the protective power of the brigand, disposed the
peasant to prefer his rule to that of the more unswerving discipline of
the State. The brigand was at least one of his class, if not of his own
kindred. He knew and could feel for the peculiar hardships which pressed
upon the poor man. If he took from the proud man, he spared the humble
one; and, lastly, he possessed the charm which personal daring and
indifference to danger never fail to exercise over the minds of the
masses.
Let us again look to Ireland, to see how warmly the sympathies of the
peasant follow those who assume to arraign the laws of the State, and
establish a wild justice of their own—how naturally they favour them,
with what devotion they will screen them, and at what personal peril
they will protect them; and if we have to confess that centuries have
seen us vainly struggling with the secret machinery which sustains crime
amongst ourselves, let us be honest enough to spare our reproaches to
those who have not yet suppressed brigandage in Southern Italy. It is
not, in fact, with the armed and mounted robber that the State is at
issue, but with a civilisation which has created him. He is not the
disease, he is only one of its symptoms; and to effect a cure of the
malady the remedies must go deeper.
Nor is the question an easy one to resolve; for though Garibaldi with a
few followers sufficed to overthrow a dynasty, the whole force of a
mighty army, backed by a powerful public opinion, has not succeeded in
firmly establishing a successor.
Piedmont is not loved in the South. There is not a trait in the
Piedmontese character which has not its antitype in the Neapolitan; and
they whose object it was to exhibit the sub-Alpine Italian in the most
unfavourable colours, could not lack opportunity to do so. The
severities practised towards the brigands—which were not always, nor
could they be, exercised with discrimination—furnished ample occasion
for these attacks. Many of these assumed a Garibaldian, or even
Mazzinian tone, and affected indignation at cruelties of which the
people—the _caro popolo_—were always the victims. One of the chief
brigands, Chiavone, pretended to imitate Joseph Garibaldi; and in dress,
costume, and a certain bold, frank manner, assumed to represent the
great popular leader. Amongst his followers he counted Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Germans, Belgians, and, it is said, Irish. One of these
foreigners was a man of high rank and ancient lineage, Count Alfred de
Trazégnies—a near relative of M. de Merode’s: he was taken prisoner and
shot. Another was the famous Borjès, from whom was taken the
instructions given him by General Clary, and, more interesting still, a
journal written in his own hand.
Though his “instructions” are full of grandiloquent descriptions of
battalions and squadrons and batteries—horse, foot, and dragoons—with
exact directions given as to the promotions, the staff appointments, the
commissariat,—let us hear how he himself describes the first steps of
his enterprise.
Having with great difficulty succeeded in obtaining about twenty muskets
at Malta, he saw himself in some embarrassment as to getting away from
the island, where intimations as to his project were already about. He
succeeded, however, in getting on board of a small coasting vessel with
his officers, and landed after a two days’ voyage at Brancaleone. “The
shore,” he says, “was totally deserted, no trace of habitation to be
seen; and, directed at last by the glimmer of a solitary light, we came
upon the hut of a shepherd, who received us kindly and hospitably. The
next day he guided us to the little town of Precacore, where we were met
by the curate, and amidst cries of Viva Francesco Secondo conducted into
the Piazza. I was cheered by this,” says he, “and deemed it a lucky
augury. About twenty peasants enrolled themselves here under my command,
and we moved on to Caraffa, where I was told a friendly welcome awaited
me. On passing, however, near St Agata, a company of the mobilised
National Guard, about sixty in number, opened a sharp fire on us, and my
new recruits took to their heels, leaving me alone with my officers.
Sustained, however, by a strong position, we held our own for an hour
and a half, after which a deputation from Caraffa came to offer me the
hospitality of that city—an offer I was fortunate enough to refuse, for
another and far more serious ambuscade was prepared for me there.”
At Cirella he came up with a Bourbon partisan named Mittica, with one
hundred and twenty men under him, but who refused to accept him as a
leader, and in fact treated him and his officers as spies and prisoners.
After many dangers and much suffering, deserted by Mittica and his band,
Borjès found himself in Tovre, “where an old soldier of the 3d
Cacciatori offered to accompany me—the only follower I have met with up
to this day.”
His narrative, simply and unaffectedly written, is one of the most
extraordinary records of suffering, privation, and peril, and at the
same time of devotion to his enterprise and zeal in the cause of the
ex-King. He firmly believes that the mass of the people are “royalist,”
that he only needs five hundred men, well armed and disposed to obey
him, to “overthrow the revolution” and restore the sovereign.
He met his death like a brave man. He was surprised with some of his
followers at a farmhouse in the very last village before crossing the
Roman frontier, to which he was hastening. A young Piedmontese Major,
Franchini, with a detachment of Bersaglieri and some mounted gendarmes,
surrounded the house and at last set fire to it, on which Borjès
surrendered and was immediately shot. “I was on my way to tell the
King,” said he with his last words, “that he has nothing but cowards and
scoundrels to defend him—that Crocco is a villain and Langlais a fool.”
Then turning to the Major he added, “Thank fortune for it that I did not
start one hour earlier this morning, for I should have gained the Roman
frontier, and you would have heard more of me.”
The Piedmontese have been severely blamed for the execution of Borjès.
Indeed he has found no less an advocate than Victor Hugo, who would not
consent to have him ranked with Crocco, Ninco Nancho, and the rest, mere
brigands and robbers on the highway. That the popular sentiment of Italy
was not disposed in his favour may be assumed from the indignation felt
by all the villages of the frontier when General Lamarmora consented
that the body of Borjès should be exhumed and conveyed to Rome. There is
little doubt, however, that his being a Spaniard influenced this
feeling. In no country of Europe is the foreigner regarded with the same
jealousy and distrust.
While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force,
not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the
Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is
one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome
supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if
left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks
from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are
friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little
political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to
give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the
immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the
peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him
than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription
for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very
enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being
“mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of
soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute,
rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his
business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year!
If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in
Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not,
perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the
sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as
liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The
Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their
free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear
to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid,
stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and
repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay,
animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of
red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the
regular legions of the King.
In the great offices of the State, and in the Prefectures, it was easy
enough for the Piedmontese to appoint their own partisans; but how do
this throughout the rural districts, the small towns, and the villages?
In these the choice lay between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and a
Mazzinian. If you would not accept a follower of the late King, you must
take one who disowned sympathies with all royalty. The Syndics and
“Maires” of the smaller cities have been almost to a man the enemies of
the Northern Italian. It is through these all the difficulties of
propagating “union” sentiments have been experienced. It is by their
lukewarmness, if not something worse, that Brigandage is able still to
hold its ground, not so much because they are well affected to the
Bourbons, or that they cherish sentiments of Mazzinianism, but simply
that they disliked Northern Italy, nor could any rule be so distasteful
to them as that which came from that quarter. That the French occupation
of Rome has tended to maintain and support Brigandage cannot for a
moment be disputed. The policy of France, from the very hour of the
treaty of Villafranca, has been to perpetuate the difficulties of
Italian rule—to exhibit the country in a state of permanent disorder,
and the people unquiet, dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce the peninsula
to that condition, in fact, in which not only would the occupation of
Rome be treated as a measure of security to Europe at large, but the
graver question urged whether a more extended occupation of territory
might not be practicable and possible.
If Garibaldi’s expedition had not terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte,
it is well known the French would have occupied Naples. When they would
have left it again, it is not so easy to say. It is clear enough then to
see, how little soever the French may like that Brigandage that now
devastates the South, they are not averse to the distress and trouble it
occasions to the Italian Government, all whose ambitions have been
assumed as so many menaces against France. Had you been content with the
territory we won for you—had you remained satisfied with a kingdom of
six millions, who spoke your own language, inherited your own
traditions, and enjoyed your own sympathies, you might have had peace
and prosperity, say the oracles of the Tuileries; but you would be a
great nation, and you are paying the penalty. “This comes of listening
to England, who never aided you, instead of trusting to us who shed our
blood in your cause.”
France never has consented to a united Italy; whether she may yet do so
is, however improbable, still possible; one thing is, however,
clear—until she does give this consent, not in mere diplomatic
correspondence, but in heart and wish, the southern provinces of the
peninsula will remain unconquered territories, requiring the presence of
a large force, and even with that defying the power of the Government to
reduce them to obedience.
Brigandage is but the open expression of a discontent which exists in
every class and every condition in the districts it pervades. It is the
assertion of the Catholic for the Pope, of the Royalist for the Bourbon,
of the Revolutionist against a discipline, and last of all, of the
Southern Italian against being ruled by that Northern race whose
intelligence he despises, and for whose real qualities of manliness he
has neither a measure nor a respect.
One word as to the Camorra before we conclude: and first of all what is
this Camorra of which men talk darkly and in whispers, and whose very
syllables are suppressed while the servants are in the room? The Camorra
is an organised blackmail, which, extending its exactions to every trade
and industry, carries the penalties of resistance to its edicts even to
death.
The Camorra has its agents everywhere. On the Mole, where the boatman
hands over the tenth of the fare the passenger has just paid him—at the
door of the hotel, where the porter counts out his gains and gives over
his tithe—at the great restaurant, at the theatre, at the
gaming-table—some one is sure to present himself as the emissary of this
dreaded society, and in the simple words, “for the Camorra,” indicate a
demand that none have courage to resist.
The jails are, however, the great scenes for the exercise of this
system. There the Camorra reigns supreme. In the old Bourbon days the
whole discipline of the prisons was maintained by the Camorristi, who
demanded from each prisoner as he entered the usual fees of the place.
The oil for the lamp in honour of the Madonna had to be paid for, then
came a sort of fee for initiation, after which came others in the shape
of taxes on the income of the prisoner and his supposed means, with
imposts upon leave to smoke, to drink, or to gamble. His incomings too
were taxed, and a strict account demanded of all his gains, from which
the tenth was rigidly subtracted. To resist the imposts was to provoke a
quarrel, not unfrequently ending fatally; for the Camorristi ruled by
terror, and well knew all the importance of maintaining their
“prestige.”
The revenues of the Camorra, amounting to sums almost incredibly large,
are each week handed over to the treasurer of the district, and
distributed afterwards to the followers of the order by the Capo di
Camorra, according to the rank and services of each, any concealment or
malversation of funds being punished with death. The society itself not
only professes to protect those who belong to it, but to extend its
influence over all who obey its edicts; and thus the poor creature who
sells his fruit at the corner of the street sees his wares under the
safeguard of one of these mysterious figures, who glide about here and
there, half in listlessness, and whose dress may vary from the patched
rags of almost mendicancy to the fashionable attire of a man of rank and
condition.
In the cafés where men sit at chess and dominoes, the Camorrist appears,
and with his well-known whisper demands his toll. In vain to declare
that the play is not for money; it is for the privilege to play at all
that his demand is now made. The newly appointed clerk in a public
office, the secretary to the minister, it is said, have been applied to,
and have not dared to dispute a claim which would be settled otherwise
by the knife.
Recognised by the old police of Naples, tolerated and even employed to
track out the crimes of those who did not belong to the order, the
Camorrists acquired all the force and consideration of an institution.
Men felt no shame at yielding to a terror so widespread; nor would it
have been always safe to speak disparagingly of a sect whose followers
sometimes lounged in royal antechambers as well as sought shelter under
the portico of a church.
It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn
member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds.
Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a
secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them
suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted
those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply
to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra
could at a moment’s notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty
which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of
his people.
It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first
introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence
of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the
depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say,
the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks
Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined
the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman.
The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal
with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed,
against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been
made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that
all these measures are in vain—that the magistracy itself is not free
from the taint: and certain it is that the system prevails largely in
the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of
fashion and society.
The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution
of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good
for the gallows, is a large element in this land, and it will require
something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.
A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of
the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be
before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that
world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact,
no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its
progress.
It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with
Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the
peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who
take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have
no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they
would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of
their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the
conscription. In these respects the old _régime_ was less severe than
the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large;
not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging
indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the
Austrians.”
The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese
rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern
temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than
burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that
wonderfully resembles revenge.
What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but
one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not
obtained that footing there which promises to make _her_ cause _their_
cause, or _her_ civilisation _their_ civilisation. If the Bourbons
governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!
LUDWIG UHLAND.
Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at
least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a
poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he
has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his
death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at
Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his
seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was
said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was
occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet,
Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.
The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the
University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one
Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in
his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of
Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the
talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the
rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in
prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the
young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in
his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of
German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen
he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, ‘Der Sterbender
Held,’ and ‘Der Blinder König,’ found their way into that collection of
his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating
between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to
long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen, he was
distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of
skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was
afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the
Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in
the exquisite poem of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend vor uns allen,”
while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland’s maternal uncle,
Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes
by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in
Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he
placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von
Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he
records his impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’ In 1810 Uhland went to
Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained
in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as
an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His
tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’ which belongs to this period,
elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy
of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter,
by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to
whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen auf das Grab einer
edlen Frau.’ In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at
Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848,
though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion
presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the
restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately
granted, as most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from
prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of
deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned
to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many
respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great
harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large,
was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a
priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by
children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a
fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to
the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is
long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over
the brows, and narrower above—altogether an ordinary honest man’s face,
nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was
unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him,
that every one could not be a poet. Uhland’s manners appear to have been
plain and unpretending—rather those of a man who makes friends than
acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even
jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear
to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented
with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the
road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open
garden-house, and at ten o’clock every morning used to go out for a long
walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At
Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in
that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and
the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar
bridge, only ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was
his garden, arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,” from which he made
his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the
same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual
society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for
that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank
from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from
general notoriety.
Politically, Uhland was a people’s man without being a Radical. His love
of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank,
station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of
the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy
opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called “the good old
right.” In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In
Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the
Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis
Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was
wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in
privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the
Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of
Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet
would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as
the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his
life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he
wanted—robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved,
sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself
thought a full compensation even for blindness.
The uneventfulness of Uhland’s life, his unpretending presence, his very
look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of his
habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling,
all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of
Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions.
But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint
nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of
landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed
the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are
merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely
paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background
to his “genre” pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases
of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are
alive with the breath of Spring—fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are
aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him
than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true
singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than
monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird,
rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box.
This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of
a Burns, a Béranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the
glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in
“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”
which belongs to the poetry of Moore. In matter and choice of subject,
and in some measure in respect of treatment, he has much in common with
Walter Scott. His preparatory studies were much of the same nature,
consisting in the history, scenery, and legends of his own country. He
has done for Germany what even Schiller and Goethe with all their
greatness omitted to do in the same degree. He has immortalised her
local recollections. Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue
his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind,
whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written
are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground,
best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while
others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into
the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the
people in the shape of national songs. Uhland differs most from the twin
stars of Germany—Schiller and Goethe—in that his poetry is more
exclusively objective than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt in his glorious
self, and his all-absorbing devotion to art. Like Horace’s hero, a world
might have fallen in ruins about him and he would not have quailed; and,
indeed, all the crash of empires and clash of armies in which he lived
left his brow as serene as that of one of the gods of Epicurus. But
Uhland could not sing through the humiliation of his country, and his
voice sank within him through the French occupation; but when Germany
arose at length, and with incredible hardihood pushed back the flood of
invasion, Uhland, like Körner and others, did manful service, not by
fighting and falling among the foremost, as Körner did, but with even
better judgment, as husbanding his gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the
Liberation War. His songs of that time have a deep and manly note
peculiarly their own, and they are such as no lesser circumstances could
have called forth. Uhland, again, as distinguished from Schiller and
Goethe, was the prominent poet of the Romantic school. But he was to
them what Socrates was to the Sophists—counted with them, but not of
them. From whatever source he derived his inspirations, he always
remained fast rooted in truth and nature. The unreal and morbid
sentimentality of Tieck and Novalis was unknown to him; nor did he share
the Romeward tendencies of Friedrich Schlegel, while fully appreciating
the beauty of the Roman Catholic ritual and associations, and freely
interweaving them with the golden tissue of his compositions. On the
whole, he is the most German of German poets, as he owes none of his
inspiration to “the gods of Greece,” and little to any foreign source,
except those old Romance writers whom he studied at Paris; but then it
must be borne in mind that the early threads of history in France and
Germany are closely interwoven, and the empire of the Franks in
particular belonged as much to one as to the other.
In attempting to present to the English reader some of the best of the
poems of Uhland, we must premise that to translate a perfect poem from
one language into another is simply an impossibility, and difficult
exactly in proportion to the degree in which any poem approaches
perfection. The special difficulty of translating German poetry into
English, and _vice versâ_, consists in this, that though the two
languages are not in their basis much more than dialects of the same
original stock, yet German is as generally dissyllabic as English is
monosyllabic, owing in part to English having discarded inflection where
German retains it. We are aware that many of Uhland’s poems are already
known through very good translations, one of those most highly spoken of
being that of Mr Platt. Longfellow has also done freely into English
verse the ‘Castle by the Sea,’ ‘The Black Knight,’ the ‘Luck of
Edenhall,’ and others, and has succeeded admirably in catching the
spirit of the original. Not having Mr Platt’s translations before us, as
we write in Germany, we must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland’s memory,
for attempts of our own in the same direction, in which we have tried to
reproduce as nearly as we can the ideas of the original in the metres in
which they appeared. It is impossible to find a song in the whole
collection more perfect than ‘Der Wirthin Töchterlein.’ There is not a
word or thought one would wish changed. The pathos is expressed, without
a single pathetic epithet, solely by the situation. This poem has been
interpreted politically, as alluding to the different feelings with
which three classes of patriots regard the corpse of German liberty. But
to our mind this spoils the simplicity of the picture. It is more likely
to be true that the poem was occasioned by an incident of Uhland’s
youth, since it is said that he once stopped some students who were
singing it under his window, telling them not to end it, as the end had
too close a personal interest for him. If this be true, the poem is more
complimentary to the memory of the fair maid of the inn than to the lady
who became Frau Uhland. But poets will be poets, as boys will be boys.
THE LANDLADY’S DAUGHTER.
Three students they hied them over the Rhine,
And there they turned in at a landlady’s sign.
“Landlady, hast thou good beer and wine?
And where is that beauteous daughter of thine?”
“My beer and wine are fresh and clear;
My daughter she lies on the funeral-bier.”
And when they did enter the inner room,
There lay she all white in a shrine of gloom.
The first from her face the veil he took,
And, gazing upon her with sorrowful look,
“Oh, wert thou living, thou fairest maid,
’Tis thee I would love from this hour,” he said.
The second let down on the face that slept
The veil, and turned him away and wept:
“Alas for thee there on the funeral-bier!
For thee I have loved full many a year.”
The third, he lifted again the veil,
And kissed her upon the mouth so pale:
“I loved thee before, I love thee to-day,
And I will love thee for ever and aye!”
The last line, “Und werde dich lieben in ewigkeit,” would be more
correctly rendered, “And I will love thee _in_ eternity.” And we are
equally aware that our “landlady’s sign” is objectionable, as the
original is simply, “They turned in there to a landlady’s.” But it would
be hard to render it otherwise without losing the quadruple rhyme, which
has a certain mournful elegance. ‘The Landlady’s Daughter’ naturally
leads us to ‘The Goldsmith’s Daughter.’ In this poem we must not suppose
that the hero and heroine meet for the first time. The maiden has fallen
in love with the knight, her superior in station, but scarcely dares
even confess it to herself, till the knight agreeably surprises her by
adorning her as his bride, taking her acceptance for granted. We would
not spoil the romance by hinting that it may not have been an uncommon
case in the middle ages for young noblemen of small fortune to seek
their brides from the rich _bourgeoisie_ of the Free Towns.
THE GOLDSMITH’S DAUGHTER.
A goldsmith stood within his stall,
Mid pearl and precious stone:
Of all the gems I own, of all,
Thou art the best, Heléna,
My daughter, darling one.
One day came in a knight so fine:
“Good morrow, maiden fair;
Good morrow, worthy goldsmith mine;
Make me a costly crownlet,
For my sweet bride to wear.”
The crown was made, the work was good,
It shone the eye to charm,
But Helen hung in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
The trinket on her arm.
“Ah! happy happy _she_ to bear
This glittering bridal toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
A crownlet but of roses,
How full were I of joy!”
Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the crown approve:
“Now make me, goldsmith, best of men,
A ring with diamonds set,
To deck my lady-love.”
The ring was made, the work was good,
The diamonds brightly shone,
But Helen drew ‘t in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
Her finger half-way on.
“Ah, happy happy _she_ to bear
This other glittering toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
But of his hair a ringlet,
How full were I of joy!”
Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the ring approve:
“Thou’st made me, goldsmith, best of men,
The gifts with rarest cunning,
For my sweet lady-love.
“Yet would I prove them how they sit;
So prithee, maiden, here
Let me on thee for trial fit
My darling’s bridal jewels:
In beauty she’s thy peer.”
’Twas on a Sunday morn betime;
It happed the maiden fair,
Expectant of the matin chime,
Had donned her best of raiment
With more than wonted care.”
With coyness all aglow, behold
The maid before him stand;
He crowns her with the crown of gold,
The ring upon her finger
He sets, then takes her hand.
“Heléna sweet, Heléna true,
I’ve ended now the jest;
That fairest bride is none but you,
By whom I would the crownlet
And ring should be possest.
“Mid gold and pearl and jewel fine
Hath been thy childhood’s home;
Be this to thee a welcome sign
That thou to heights of honour
With me shalt duly come.”
There is a great dramatic beauty in the accident of the girl having put
on her best apparel to make ready to go to church, so that the knight
has only to furnish her with the bridal accessaries to prepare her at a
moment’s notice to go to church with him.
A ferry-boat is a favourite subject for painters; and the navigation of
his native Neckar has been to Uhland the occasion of some of his
sweetest verse-pictures. In the poem called ‘The Boat’ he shows how a
freight of people, before unacquainted with each other, and therefore
silent, struck up an intimacy, and parted with regret, when some
improvised music had once furnished an introduction.
THE BOAT.
The boat is swiftly going,
Adown the river’s flowing;
No word beguiles the labour,
For no one knows his neighbour.
What pulls from coat the stranger,
The tawny forest-ranger?
A horn that sounds so mildly,
The stream-banks echo wildly.
Then haft and stopper screwing,
His staff to flute undoing,
Another, deftly playing,
Chimes with the cornet’s braying.
Shy sat the maid, self-chidden,
As speech were thing forbidden,
Now blend her accents willing
With flute and cornet’s trilling.
The rowers with new pleasure
Pull strokes that match the measure;
The boat the stream divideth,
And, lulled by music, glideth.
It strikes with shock the landing,
The folk are all disbanding;
“May we again meet, brother,
On board this boat or other!”
The companion to this little cabinet picture of the boat going with the
stream is the crossing of the ferry. The poet offers the ferryman three
times his fare, because the spirits of two friends, now dead, who
crossed the same ferry with him in past years, are supposed to have gone
with him.
THE FERRY.
Many years have passed for ever
Since I came across the river;
Here’s the tower, in evening’s blushing,
There, as erst, the weir is rushing.
Then with me the boat did carry
Two companions o’er the ferry,
One a friend, a father seeming,
One a youth with high hopes beaming.
That one lived a peaceful story,
And is gone in peace to glory;
This, of all most fiery-hearted,
Hath in fight and storm departed.
So when I, mid blessing cherished,
Dare to think on seasons perished,
Must I still to sorrow waken,
Missing friends that Death hath taken.
Friendship may not be united,
Save when soul to soul is plighted:
Full of soul those hours went by me,
Still to souls a bond doth tie me.
Ferryman, I gladly proffer
Thrice the fare that others offer,
Since two spirits thou didst carry
At my side across the ferry.
Longfellow, in his ‘Hyperion,’ has beautifully rendered the spirit of
this poem, if he has somewhat missed its cadence.
The fine elegy on the death of Tell belongs to Uhland’s ‘Songs of
Freedom,’ Tell’s death is undemonstrative, and he characteristically
comes by it, by rescuing a child from a torrent. ‘The Sunken Crown’
stands before it in the collection, probably by way of introduction:—
THE SUNKEN CROWN.
There, over on the hill-top,
A little house doth stand;
One gazes from the threshold
On all the lovely land.
There sits a free-born peasant
Upon the bench at even;
He whets his scythe so blithely,
And sings his thanks to Heaven.
There, under in the hollow,
Where glooms the mere of old,
There lieth deeply sunken
A proud rich crown of gold:
Though in it gleam at nightfall
Carbuncle and sapphire,
Since ages grey it lies there,
To seek it none desire.
In his neighbouring Switzerland the poet seems to see the image of his
ideal freedom, modest and self-respecting; founded on the laws of
decency and order; possessing its ancient charters and title-deeds; no
ephemeral offspring of democratic chaos; a gentle and serene goddess of
justice holding the exact balance between despotism and universal
suffrage. Such freedom as this, in many grand patriotic strains, he
desires for Würtemberg—a country whose praises he enumerates in soil,
products, climate, scenery, and manners, only lamenting one want,
without which it would be a paradise, the want of “Good Right.” He is
certainly justified in his praise of his country, which, with the
Grand-Duchy of Baden, forms a corner in the map of Europe which is a
garden of fertility, a museum of antiquities, and a labyrinth of natural
grandeur; but we question whether Uhland is not over-sensitive as to its
political misery.
When we pass from his ‘Songs of Freedom’ to his ‘Songs of the
Affections,’ we find the same moderation and purity of sentiment. Uhland
always seems afraid of saying too much. His exquisite taste is a
constant check upon him. He leaves the lines of his sketches to speak
for themselves, and shrinks from too much elaboration. The imaginative
reader may, if he pleases, supply for himself much of the inessential
detail. What a picture of a bashful old-world lover he gives us in his
poem called ‘Resolution!’
RESOLUTION.
She comes to walk in this sweet wild;
To-day I’ll banish all alarm;
Why should I tremble at a child
That does no living creature harm?
All give her greeting near and far;
I would, but dare not do the same;
And to my soul’s transcendent star
I cannot lift my eyes for shame.
The flowers that bend as she doth fare,
The birds with their voluptuous song,—
All these their love so well declare,
Why must I only feel it wrong?
To highest Heaven I oft prefer
Through livelong nights a bitter plaint;
Yet would I say three words to her,
“I love thee,” then my heart is faint.
In wait behind the tree I’ll stay
She passes in her daily walk,
And whisper “My sweet life” to-day,
As if in dreaming I did talk.
I will—but oh the fright I feel!
She comes, and she will see me sure;
So here into the bush I’ll steal,
And I shall see her pass secure.
For pathetic simplicity, perhaps none of his love-poems stands higher
than Die Mähderin—the ‘Female Mower.’ There is a pathos in the very fact
of the delicate girl—delicate at least in feeling—being engaged in rude
masculine toil, a case but too common in many countries; then, again, in
her hopeless attachment to the son of the rich farmer; then in her
overtasking her strength in mowing the whole field without refreshment
or repose, because the avaricious and selfish old man has promised her
his son’s hand as the price; and again, in the killing deception at the
close. She dies a martyr to the combined effects of the labour and the
disappointment, and the old man has virtually murdered her to prevent
her marrying his son and for selfish gain. Another example of a deep and
simple pathos, produced by two pictures of the same place, is ‘The
Castle on the Sea;’ it is a dioramic change of effect produced by a
dialogue. First the castle stands superb in rising or setting sunlight,
towering to heaven and bowing to the deep; the king and queen walk on
the terrace in their royal insignia, and a beautiful princess walks with
them: the scene changes to a weird moonlight effect, where the castle
stands in ghostly grandeur; the king and queen are there on the terrace,
but without their robes or crowns; they are in mourning, and the
princess is no longer with them. This ballad has been effectively
translated by Longfellow. Though verging on the impossible in subject,
‘The Mournful Tournament’ is a grand tragic sketch. Seven knights came
to joust for the favour of the king’s daughter, but as they came in
through the castle gate they heard the knell of her funeral. They
persist in the tournament; for the one who loves her most truly, holds
that still, though dead, she is worthy to be fought for, the victor
gaining her wreath and ring. All fall in the fight but he, and he is
mortally wounded, but, as the prize of victory, is buried with his
lady-love.
Similar in actual improbability of subject, but demonstrating its bare
possibility by its tragic truth, is the ballad of ‘Three Young Ladies.’
The father brings to mind the Greek bandit, the hero of About’s ‘Roi des
Montagnes,’ who keeps his daughter at school at Athens, and when she
wants a new piano, harries a village. As he returns from his rides, or
raids, the three maidens ask this feudal tyrant what he has brought for
them. The first, he knows, loves gold and finery; he has killed a knight
for her, and brought her the spoil. But the dead knight was her lover;
she strangles herself with the stolen chain, and dies beside his body.
Two maidens only welcomed the father on his next return. The second, he
knows, loves the chase; so he brings her a hunting-lance with a gold
band, having killed a wild huntsman to obtain it. The wild huntsman was
her lover, and she falls on the lance and dies beside him. One maiden
only greets him the next time. Flowers are her passion; so he brings her
flowers, having slain the bold gardener to obtain them. She takes the
flowers and seeks the body of the dead gardener, who was also her lover;
but flowers can inflict no wounds, so she stays beside him till the
flowers wither, and she withers with them. ‘The Black Knight’ has been
done full justice to by Longfellow. The practice of wearing visors in
the ages of chivalry made such tales a poetic possibility. Death comes
to joust in a king’s court, like a knight in black armour on black
steed; he kills all the champions, dances with the king’s daughter,
pours out a draught for the prince and princess, from which they quickly
grow pale and sink. The old king begs him to take him also, but he says
that “he only breaks flowers in spring,” and stalks away. In the ‘Luck
of Edenhall’ Uhland gets upon English ground. His own preserves are so
well stocked that he had no need to poach on those of the minstrels of
the Scottish Border. But the offence is a single one, and may be
forgiven for its admirable success and the world-wide interest of the
beautiful Cumbrian legend.
The trumpet-like bray and strange metre of this poem render it one of
the most difficult for a translator to grapple with; Longfellow,
however, has done it almost without fault, the only exception we might
take being to the repetition of the “crystal tall,” and the expression
“the cup to praise” instead of “the cup to honour.” But in sonorous
cadence his rendering equals the original. There is a thrilling
solemnity in the remark at the end, that the world will one day be
dashed to pieces like the shattered Luck of Edenhall. In a note below
Longfellow’s translation it is said, “The tradition on which this ballad
is founded, and the ‘shards of the Luck of Edenhall,’ still exist in
England. The goblet is in the possession of Sir Christopher Musgrave,
Bart. of Edenhall, Cumberland, and is not so entirely shattered as the
ballad leaves it.”
If not the very best of all the ballads, at least the most
characteristic of the poet’s ethical bent, is ‘The Singer’s Curse.’ With
this we may fitly conclude our specimens, as it is a declaration of the
greatness and holiness of the poet’s mission, and a prophecy of the
annihilation of all earthly pomp that is founded on injustice and wrong,
which it is the poet’s highest duty to raise his voice against. It might
also be entitled ‘The Martyr-Minstrel.’
THE SINGER’S CURSE.
In days of old a castle stood, it stood so haught and high,
Wide o’er the lands it shone to where the blue sea met the sky;
All round it lush flower-gardens a perfumed girdle made,
Wherein with radiance rainbow-arched reviving fountains played.
Sat there a proud king rich in spoil of war and rich in land,
Upon his ancient throne he sat so gaunt and grimly grand;
For all he thinks is Terror, and all he looks is Hate,
And all he speaks is Scourging, and all he writes is Fate.
Once did a noble minstrel pair up to this castle go,
The one with golden ringlets, the other with locks of snow;
The old man with the harp he sat on a goodly steed astride,
The while his blooming comrade tript gaily at his side.
Spake to the youth the old man, “My son, be strong to-day;
Our deepest songs remember, attune thy fullest lay;
Knit all the nerves of music, the joy, the pain, in one;
Our task it is to-day to touch the tyrant’s heart of stone.”
Now stand the singers twain within the lofty pillared house,
And high upon his throne the king sits with his royal spouse;
The king so fiercely splendid, like blood-red northern light,
But sweet and mild the queen as looks the full moon on the night.
Then smote the strings the old man right wondrously and well,
That full and fuller on the ear the tides of music swell;
And then angelically clear the young man’s voice did flow
In the elder’s pauses, like a choir of spirits, weird and low.
They sing of spring and true love, of an age of golden youth,
Of freedom and of manhood, of holiness and truth;
They sing of every sweetness that makes man’s bosom soft,
They sing of every greatness that bears man’s heart aloft.
Forthwith the courtier circle unlearns the courtly sneer,
The king’s disdainful warriors bow down to God and fear.
Then, as her soul with tender pain and rapture overflows,
The queen before the singers from her bosom flings the rose.
“Ye have beguiled my people—will ye bring my wife to shame?”
So cries the king in fury, quivering through all his frame;
He hurls his sword, that flashing strikes through the stripling’s heart;
Now from the source of golden songs a blood-jet high doth start.
Strewn as by sudden tempest is all the listening swarm,
The youth hath sobbed his life out upon his master’s arm;
Upon his horse he sets him, wound in his mantle’s fold,
And fastly binds him upright, and quits with him the hold.
But at the high gate halting, the old man stands sublime,
His harp he seizes wildly, of harps the peerless prime;
Against a marble column he hath dashed its strength in twain,
Then cries aloud that garden and castle peal amain.
“Woe, woe to you, proud halls, no more echo melodious word
Through all your vaulted hollows, nor ever song or chord;
No, moans alone and wailing, and coward step of slaves,
Till sprites of vengeance trample you to dust and mould of graves.
“Woe to you, odorous gardens, in May-tide’s lovely light,
As ye behold this dead face, so sadly changed to sight;
Even so untimely wither, with every fountain dry,
And naked all and turned to stone through coming ages lie.
“Woe to thee, murderer accurst, of minstrel-craft the bane,
For crowns of savage glory strive on, and strive in vain;
And be thy name forgotten, in endless midnight sunk,
And pass as into vain air that last death-rattle shrunk.”
The old man’s voice hath pealed it, and Heaven hath heard on high;
The mighty walls are levelled, the halls in ruin lie;
One pillar lone and lofty still tells of vanished power;
Ev’n that is cloven, and may fall before the morning hour.
Around for perfumed gardens is a heath of desert land,
No tree sheds welcome shadow, no spring leaps in the sand.
That king he perished all unnamed in hero-scroll or verse,
Forgotten, blindly overwhelmed!—so wrought the singer’s curse.
Shortly before his death Uhland wrote a little epigram on the death of a
young child, which it would be inexcusable to attempt to give in any
other language than the original, especially as it has not yet appeared
in any collected edition of his works.
AUF DEN TOD EINES KINDES.
Du kamst, du gingst mit leiser Spur,
Ein flücht’ger Gast in Erdenland
Woher? Wohin?—wir wissen nur
Aus Gottes Hand in Gottes Hand.
In these lines the childlike spirit of the old poet may have conceived a
fitting epitaph for himself, so calm and simple was his life and death.
But the “mit leiser Spur,” “with faint footfall,” could not have been
applied to his own case except by his own modesty; for, unmistakably, if
ever man did so, to use the language of his admirer, Longfellow, Ludwig
Uhland has left some very enduring “footsteps on the sands of Time.”
MY INVESTMENT IN THE FAR WEST.
“A golden opportunity, sir; Fortune knocking at your door, as she knocks
but once in a man’s lifetime; and if you refuse to let her in, excuse
me, sir, but you will repent it—you will.”
Such were the persuasive words of Colonel Coriolanus Sling, as he
cracked his filberts and sipped his sherry in the snug dining-room of my
villa at Stamford Hill. The Colonel, as his name indicates pretty
clearly, was an eminent citizen of the model republic, not long arrived
on British ground, and the bearer of an introductory letter from my
esteemed friend Cassius Corkey, a late Secretary of Legation. I had
given a little dinner in honour of my new acquaintance; the repast had
gone off pleasantly enough, and the ladies had left us four gentlemen to
our wine and politics, when the Colonel uttered the above remarks.
It was early autumn, and, if the flower-beds of the garden were somewhat
faded, the shrubberies of Magnolia Villa had still a cheerful aspect;
and the lawn, as seen through the French windows, was smooth and trim as
a gigantic piece of Genoa velvet. Not a weed, not a withered leaf,
marred the neatness of the bright gravel of the walks: the fountain was
in full play, liberally sprinkling the goldfish in the little marble
basin; and the transparent walls of the conservatory showed a wealth of
many-tinted flowers within. There may be larger and more stately
residences than Magnolia Villa, but I flatter myself that few
proprietors could make more of four and a half acres of ground, imperial
measurement, than your humble servant, George Bulkeley. We were, as I
have said, four in company—the Colonel; young Tom Harris of the Stock
Exchange; a friend and countryman of the Colonel’s, by name Dr Titus A.
C. Bett; and myself.
“Why, Colonel Sling,” answered I, doubtfully, “I don’t quite know about
that. The distance, you see, is great, and the risk may be——”
“Nothing at all!” interrupted my guest, warmly; “I pledge you the
honour, sir, of a free-born citizen of the U-nited States, nothing at
all! The plum, sir, is ripe, and ready to drop into your mouth
spontaneous; and I may safely assure you, sir, that nothing but my
gratitude for your hospitality would have induced me to promulgate a
scheme so out-and-out auriferous as the Great Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway will eventuate.”
I did not always find it in my power to follow the Colonel through all
the windings of an argument. His exuberant diction was occasionally too
much for me; but the drift of what he said was pretty clear, and I was
greatly struck with it.
Tom Harris, who had been staring at the Colonel with his round eyes very
wide open, here ventured to say that he supposed there would be
considerable expenditure before any returns could be expected.
“Guess you’d better shut up,” said, or rather snuffled, Dr Titus A. C.
Bett. “I have documents in my pocket to substantiate the number of miles
metalled, and the bridges, and the viaducts, and general plant. A mere
flea-bite of outlay, sir, would suffice to establish another of those
mighty arteries of communication in respect to which America, it’s
pretty much admitted, whips the world; and none but a soft-horn, sir,
would have the least dubiosity about it.”
The Doctor and the Colonel were compatriots, one being a Boston man and
the other a New-Yorker, but they were very unlike each other in aspect
and manner. For whereas the Colonel was six feet two inches high, at the
very least computation, and had an eagle beak, keen dark eyes, and a
forest of lank black hair streaming around his sallow face; the Doctor
was a little man of five feet three, or thereabouts, with weak eyes,
spectacles, a head almost bald, and a little wizened countenance.
Furthermore, the Colonel was a soft-spoken man, with conciliatory
manners and a peculiarly honeyed tone; and though he smoked
prodigiously, he consumed tobacco in no other way. The Doctor, on the
other hand, was quarrelsome and warlike to a degree, capped every
anecdote, contradicted everybody, hummed and buzzed in society like an
angry wasp, and kept a silver box full of quids in his coat-pocket.
These two were partners. Ill-natured people were malicious enough to say
that the Colonel’s department was cajolery, and the Doctor’s bullying,
in the joint interest of the firm. I gave no ear to these unkind
rumours, and indeed I justly considered the Colonel to be a man of
superior abilities and remarkable eloquence. He did not omit, on this
occasion, to spread a little soothing salve on the wounds which his
countryman’s rudeness had inflicted.
“Excuse the worthy Doctor,” he murmured, in bland accents, to Tom
Harris, whose face was very red with awkward indignation, “he is
accustomed to the free discussions of our colossal country, where the
restrictive etiquette of older and more despotic lands is spurned
beneath the boot-heels of enlightenment. Do not be riled, I beseech you,
at the freedom of his remarks; truth inspires them. You do not know,
gentlemen” (here the orator’s voice swelled into a sonorous
fulness)—“you cannot know—the resources of our glorious country: none
but American citizens can fully appreciate the mines of profitable
pro-duce always awaiting the civilising pick-axe of the hardy western
pioneer. But never, never since first our Pilgrim Fathers began to
improve the Indians off the face of nature—never since Manhattan changed
its name to New Amsterdam, afterwards to be New York—has such a
speculation as this, of which I am the felicitous herald, been going
a-begging. Hail, Columbia, happy land! as our inspired bard, who whips
your Swan of—ahem!” And here the Colonel ended in some confusion, and
hid his fluent lips for a moment in his wine-glass.
Tom Harris was quite appeased. He was not a bright personage, Tom, but
he did very well on the Stock Exchange, to which he may be said to have
been born and bred. He was the only son of the well-known old Peter
Harris, the man who made so much, as a bear, at the time of the Nore
mutiny. He, Tom—not old Peter—had inherited a great deal of money; and
though he set up for a sporting man, and generally hedged so artfully,
and made up such ingenious books on the races that his alternative was
between great losses and small ones, he was richer than when he came
into his father’s fortune. For money accrues to money, as a snowball
gathers in rolling; and it no more requires a genius to thrive in the
Stock Market than it does to rule in a Cabinet, if Chancellor Oxenstiern
tells the truth. And Tom had married a young lady of property, Miss
Mungle, daughter of Chuttnee and Mungle, or rather of the junior partner
in that great firm. Tom Harris, therefore, was wild for lucrative
investments, and so, in a qualified way, was I; and money was plentiful
in the City, as the ‘Times’ correspondent daily informed the reading
public. We therefore already began to nibble at the tempting bait which
the Colonel placed before us so dexterously.
“But,” said I, “is the traffic certain to be remunerative? The line runs
through rather a thinly-peopled tract of country, doesn’t it?”
Colonel Coriolanus Sling slapped his leathery palm upon the polished
mahogany with an emphasis that made the glasses ring. “Sir,” said he,
“you are the most sensible man I have met in this benighted—I mean this
beautiful kingdom. You have hit the exact point, my dear Mr Bulkeley, on
which the eligibility of the whole affair pivots, only you must look at
it from that sublimely piercing elevation from which the American
intellect surveys it. Sir, we must _create_ a population: sir, we must
found cities: sir, it must be ours to people the western solitudes and
to implant the germs of a nascent commerce, a new learning, a fresh
community, where now the coon and the prairie dog dwell unmolested and
alone: and, sir, future ages will decree to us colossal statues of
imperishable brass; while in this we shall realise the applause of our
consciences and of our bankers.” Here the Colonel stopped, overpowered
by his feelings, and blew his nose with a martial dissonance.
“By Jove!” said Tom Harris, “I’ll speak to old Muggins about it: if he
says ‘all right,’ I’ll take a thousand shares in the concern.”
“Muggins, sir! who is Muggins?” demanded the Doctor, waspishly: “is
Muggins, sir, a fit judge when such an enterprise is in question—an
enterprise to reflect eternal honour, sir, on its spirited and
high-feluting projectors, with the finger of ignominy to point at the
craven that draws back. Muggins! some stony-hearted London
capitalist—some toad-eater at the beck of a bloated aristocracy—some
miserable haunter of the gilded saloons of a Chancellor of the
Exchequer” (the doctor was not very particular as to the authenticity of
the accusations he flung broadcast). “Muggins, indeed!”
Tom Harris was an ingenuous youth. He looked excessively ashamed of his
allusion to Muggins, and was quite borne down by the volubility of his
transatlantic opponent. Thus it came about that a meeting was arranged
for the next day at Colonel Sling’s chambers, at which we were to
discuss the propriety of forming a company to work out the concession of
the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway, of which our American friends were the
fortunate owners. I was an older man than Tom Harris, and had
necessarily seen more of the world. And I had been “bit,” as the phrase
goes, once or twice, by Mexican Debentures, Spanish Deferred, and
unsaleable Scrip. I therefore asked, as delicately as I could, why my
new acquaintances had not raised among the enlightened capitalists of
their own country a sufficient amount to pay all preliminary expenses,
thus keeping the golden fruit entirely among Americans. But the Colonel
had an answer ready for me. He frowned, pursed up his month, bit his
lips, and assumed very much the air of a conspirator.
“Hush!” he uttered, in tragic tones; then rushing to the door, whisked
it open, putting to rout Adolphus the page, who always is listening at
keyholes, in spite of repeated corporal punishment. Adolphus scuttled
away across the hall in great dismay, and the Colonel returned to his
seat with an expression that Iago might have envied. “Hush!” said he,
“walls have auriculars, and spies are always on the watch to re-port the
words of Columbia’s children. It is well known that your arbitrary
Government has long adopted the wicked maxim due to the crafty
forethought of your Pitt, Earl of Holland, that ‘America’s danger is
England’s opportunity.’”
I could not help laughing as I answered, “I am afraid, Colonel, your
memory has not rendered the passage in exactly its original form.”
“Excuse me,” croaked the Doctor, “but nothing is more wonderful than the
ignorance which prevails in Britain, with regard to the sayings and
doings of your grandees and public persons.”
“Allow me, Doctor,” said the Colonel, oracularly, “to finish my
explanation. You see, gentlemen, we might have offered this concession
in Wall Street in the Empire City, and Wall Street would have snapped it
up; yes, sir, as an alligator would chaw pork.”
This was a forcible simile, but it did not quite content us. “Why didn’t
you?” was trembling on the lips of both Tom Harris and myself, but
politeness restrained us from uttering what our looks must have plainly
said.
The Colonel answered our looks thus: “Because, squires, there was this
difficulty in the way,—Buck, you know, is our old man.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Tom, reddening again; “but I don’t quite catch
your meaning. Buck, did you call the gentleman?”
“Buck! the old man! White House—deputations—soirees—soft sawder,”
explained the Doctor; and then we discovered that President Buchanan was
the object of discourse.
“Well,” pursued the Colonel, “Buck’s very far gone—notice to quit—time
nearly up. His successor is sure to be Abe Lincoln, if the little giant
don’t beat him at the election. Nobody else has got a chance. Caucuses
all at work! dark as moles. Now, sir, we have plugged the platform.”
“You’ve done what?” exclaimed Tom Harris.
“We’ve made it all safe, and Lincoln stands to win,” exclaimed the
Colonel, condescendingly. “Now we suspect those Southerners mean to ride
rusty if they get an anti-slavery man, like old Abe, to be President
over them; and though our folks air screamers, and that’s a fact, the
South’s an ugly customer, and our line of railway is too close to
Missouri State to be safe, if owned by Northerners. But in the smartest
row the South can make, you Britishers are sure to be handled as
tenderly as a hoosier handles a squirrel’s skin; and so it’s best the
property should be in the name of British subjects, not free citizens.
Don’t you see?”
We did see, and we resolved that on the morrow we would sift the matter
thoroughly.
“Try the claret, Colonel,” said I; “you have been drinking nothing but
sherry, and this is Chateau Margaux that I got at Bilkingham’s sale.
Those are pretty good peaches, Doctor, of my own growing.”
“Don’t talk of peaches,” said the Doctor, who, I will own, was anything
but an agreeable guest; “you must cross the broad Atlantic before you
talk of peaches, I reckon. I’ve fed pigs with better than your dukes and
earls could show. I’ve bought in the market twenty-nine big peaches for
thirty cents, I have. We do crow over you in peaches, as in most, only
your national vanity won’t permit you to see it.”
The Colonel jumped from his chair. “You be quiet!” said he; “the Doctor
is a glowing patriot, Mr Bulkeley; but I know he admires your delightful
snuggery, embellished by art and high-flying taste, as much as I do
myself. Some day, as a director of the Nauvoo and Nebraska, you may, if
you please, build a palace on the site of Magnolia Villa that will take
the shine out of the sumptuous halls of your nobility. But enough of
business. Gentlemen, if you have liquored sufficiently, we will join the
ladies.”
We did join the ladies. We found them strolling over the lawn in the
cool of a September evening, and presently we all went in to coffee. I
noticed that the Colonel was very polite and attentive, not only to my
wife, but to young Mrs Harris, who was exceedingly stupid and plain of
feature. As for Mrs and Miss Jarman, they were entertained by the Doctor
with an amusing dissertation on the difference between America and
England, and especially between London and New York. If Mrs Jarman had
hitherto cherished a belief in the pre-eminence of London, as she
apparently had, she must have received a considerable shock as the
Doctor informed her that Belgravia was but a poor place to Fourth and
Fifth Avenue, and that we were benighted creatures in all matters of
elegance and taste.
“Not a mahogany door, I guess, have I seen in this smoky beggarly town
of yours,” said Dr Bett, with both thumbs in the pockets of his black
satin vest; “and as for silver knockers and bell-pulls, I might as well
look for liberty in your institutions, or for sincerity in your press.
The helps are enough to disgust all free-born men; to see them in plush
and powder, with gold-sticks and nosegays, standing behind the gilt
vehicles of an effete aristocracy, is alone a spectacle that beats
earthquakes; and your Life Guards would sing small, I guess, by the side
of the Brooklyn Volunteers.”
The Colonel, however, could be complimentary and gentle, if his brother
republican could not; and so well did he play his cards, that when the
company drove off, and the last grinding of their carriage-wheels upon
the gravel had died away, my wife and daughters turned to me with
beaming faces, and began to sing the praises of their departed guest.
“A most superior, well-informed, gentlemanly man, is Colonel Sling,”
said the partner of my joys, emphatically.
“A delightful man!” lisped Georgina, my eldest.
“Quite an Admirable Crichton,” said Selina, my second, who is a bit of a
blue.
“Delightful! he has _so_ much conversation, and makes one laugh _so_!”
cried artless Lucy, the third and youngest of my daughters.
So he had pleased them all, and, I admit, he had pleased me too; but he
mostly showed his tact in winning the suffrages of the feminine members
of my household. For Mrs Bulkeley is not a cipher by any means, even in
my business transactions, and she has an amiable habit of warning me
against entering into commercial relations with any one she mistrusts or
dislikes. The next day beheld assembled in the showy Pall Mall chambers
of Colonel Sling the same quartette that had closed around the mahogany
in Magnolia Villa on the preceding day. Tom Harris and I drove down
there together from the City, and we found the two Americans awaiting us
with a hearty welcome. There were maps on a great table, and plans, and
minerals, and parchments, and heaps of papers, carefully stacked and
docqueted, and files of letters with great red seals to them that would
have carried conviction home to the most incredulous. And the Colonel,
after the first salutations were over, and after tenderly inquiring
about the health of my womankind, commenced a lucid explanation of the
exact position of the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway—its position, I mean,
in a pecuniary point of view, not its geographical position. The latter,
we ascertained by a glance at the map, to be in the free State of Iowa,
skirting Missouri, and with one terminus in Illinois State and the other
in Nebraska Territory. But information now came showering upon us, and
the Colonel was extremely careful to prove every fresh axiom which he
laid down by an appeal to documents of the most incontrovertible
character. There was the original concession of the line, approved by
the State Legislature, signed by the governor, registered by the State’s
law officers and by the Federal attorney of the district. There were
similar documents, to which the autographs of the governors of Nebraska
and Illinois were attached. There were the reports of surveyors, the
accounts of contractors, subcontractors, architects, machinists, and
ironmasters. Moreover, there were specimens of minerals found in the
immediate neighbourhood of the line, and within the liberal grant of
land which the State had made—which specimens the Colonel showed us, in
rather a careless way, as mere incidental advantages. But the eyes of
Tom Harris and myself sparkled at the sight; for although we were not
adepts in geology, we knew iron ore, and copper ore, and limestone, and
hornblende, and fine marble, when we saw them; and visions of mines and
quarries to be worked at vast profit, or leased for high rentals,
flitted brilliantly before us. What wonder that, on hearing the generous
terms on which the two American gentlemen were willing to admit us to a
full participation of their advantages, Tom and I shook hands most
heartily with Doctor and Colonel, and devoted ourselves from that moment
to the establishment of the projected Company? And then Colonel
Coriolanus rang the bell for lunch, and we all drank, over and over
again, in creaming bumpers of Clicquot, prosperity and success to the
Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. Two day after, out came our prospectus to
dazzle the City. A more flowery manifesto, or one more fertile in
temptations, I have seldom seen. It proved, moreover, as plainly as that
two and two make four, that the investment was as secure as the bank, if
not more so, and a hundred-fold more remunerative. Never was there such
a railway; never were there directors so opulent, so respectable, so
conscientious, so experienced; never was there a line on which the
expenses were so trifling, the traffic so enormous, or the dividend so
princely, as that of the Nauvoo and Nebraska. Iowa was a State of
boundless fertility, of inexhaustible resources—cereal, mineral,
commercial. The line would be part of a main highway to the Far West,
and the Old World and the New World pour tribute into the cornucopia of
its matchless wealth. Cities were to spring up, fair and flourishing
provinces were to blossom, where the virgin soil now awaited the spade
and the ploughshare: we were to carry tobacco, madder, corn, cattle,
immigrants, and ore. The gigantic fortunes we were to make were thrown
into the shade by the benefits we were to confer on posterity and our
contemporaries. Unborn millions were to canonise the projectors of the
Grand Nauvoo and Nebraska; and we were not only to insure for ourselves
the smiles and blessings of ages yet to come, but were to feather our
nests pretty handsomely in a few short months. Not only were we to take
rank as philanthropists of the first water, but to rig the market as
well. Nor were the advantages of the new railroad confined to the
eminent and clear-sighted capitalists who had first embarked in it. No;
in that good cause the widow’s mite was welcome. Never, it was pointed
out, was so admirable an opportunity offered to ladies of limited
income, to struggling professional men, to decayed gentry or others, to
double or treble their little store by means of the splendid dividends,
the bonuses, premiums, and other good things, to be expected from the
Company. Who has not read many such glowing proclamations as this,
promising to realise the dreams of an El Dorado for the lucky
speculator, bolstering up each statement by an imposing array of
figures, and always concluding by the recommendation that (to prevent
disappointment) _immediate_ application be made at the office for
shares? We had a secretary and cashier, and Dr Titus A. C. Bett was so
kind as to undertake the latter responsible position; while the
celebrated Wyldrake Flam, Esq., a gentleman who had been concerned with
a good many companies in his time, was happily secured for the former
situation. Sir George Gullings, M.P., a rich banker who had earned his
baronetcy by his long course of voting for a Whig Ministry, was our
chairman; and, of course, Tom Harris, Colonel Sling, and I, were among
the managing directors. We took a great many shares amongst us; but, of
course, by far the greater number were submitted to public competition,
and the frequenters of the money market bit with tolerable freedom. But
there were some wary old fish who refused so much as to nibble at the
glittering bait, and foremost amongst them was old Muggins, that veteran
stockbroker of whom Tom Harris had made mention at my table. Muggins was
a character, and disagreeably outspoken. One day I met him at the Royal
Exchange, and taking him playfully by the button, I asked him why he
gave our Company the cold shoulder.
“Mr Bulkeley, sir, I’ll tell you,” said Muggins, with a frown: “I shirk
your Company, sir, because I can’t afford to lose my property in
duck-and-drake fashion among those swindling Yankees. I hate bubbles,
sir, and this is worse, for it is a cruel robbery.”
“Sir, sir! Mr Muggins!” said I, choking with anger. What did this
remarkable man proceed to say? Just this:
“George Bulkeley, I have known you from a boy, and you are an honest
man, though not very bright (I was speechless at his effrontery). When I
call this affair a swindle, I don’t impute blame to you, for I am aware
that you are a dupe, not a duper. But I don’t pity you for losing some
pen-feathers out of your wings, as you will do; I keep my pity for the
poor wretches who will be plucked bare, and who can least spare the
little savings or capital your fine prospectus has wheedled them into
investing,—I mean the widows and old maids, the half-pay officers, the
needy clergymen, that your Company is to ruin. I wish I could see your
American friends in the pillory, I know! Good-day.”
And off he went, leaving me very angry, but a little dismayed as well.
After all, old Muggins passed for an oracle in the city; and seriously,
_had_ I examined sufficiently into the foundation of all the alluring
statements we had published with the sanction of our names? What Muggins
had said about the widows and poor helpless folks gave me an unpleasant
twinge in my heart, and conscience came and whispered, “George Bulkeley,
the accomplice of rogues, is not very far from being a rogue himself, is
he?” I made a bold resolution. I determined to go out myself to America,
and, on the spot, thoroughly to investigate the condition and prospects
of the line of railway. When I broached this proposal at the next
meeting of the Board, Colonel Sling and the Doctor were found to be
violently opposed to it, and to be inclined to resent such interference
on my part as an insult. And the influence of the two Americans was very
considerable with the committee, partly because all our information was
derived from the authority of Colonel Sling, and partly because the
transatlantic gentlemen had a custom of putting down and pooh-poohing
whatever any one but themselves happened to say. But I was firm this
time; and besides, as I offered to go out without putting the Company to
any expense whatever, the opposition to my departure could not decently
be continued. Then, to my surprise, Colonel Coriolanus Sling very kindly
offered to accompany me, and to save me all trouble and inconvenience by
lending me the aid of his perfect knowledge of the localities. The
Doctor, as cashier, must of course remain at his post; but the Colonel
could be spared, he felt assured he could be spared, and indeed he
proposed that we should go as a deputation, and at the cost of the
Company. Why not? Our shares were at a premium. Money was flowing in.
All went prosperously with us. Why not? The Colonel’s proposition was
carried _nem. con._, and it was agreed that George Bulkeley, Esq., and
Colonel Coriolanus Sling, should proceed at once to Iowa, there to
survey, report, and inspect. Mrs Bulkeley’s consent was procured; and
indeed, but for the terrors of sea-sickness, she would have insisted on
accompanying me. The Cunard packet, Mersey, was to sail from Liverpool
on the 17th of the month; our berths were engaged on board her; and it
was duly agreed that the Colonel and I were to go down together on the
day preceding that of embarkation. I never thoroughly understood why the
gallant American officer did not keep his appointment. He wrote me a
hurried note, saying that important business detained him in town, and
that he would join me in Liverpool; but I believe a dinner at the Star
and Garter, at Richmond, was the engagement in question. At any rate I
travelled alone; alone I embarked; and though I looked out for the
Colonel till the last moment, till the bell rang, and the plank was
withdrawn, and the huge paddlewheels began to revolve, no Colonel came.
And we went to sea with his name in the roll of passengers, but without
his corporeal presence on deck or in cabin. I cannot say that I was
altogether sorry. I felt instinctively that I was by far more likely to
form an unbiassed judgment when alone. I felt that in company with a man
so plausible, so fluent of speech, and so experienced in all the ways of
the singular country for which I was bound, I should be in danger of
seeing all objects through the rose-coloured haze in which it was the
Colonel’s policy to mask them. But, at the same time, I was a little
nervous at the prospect of exploring the Far West without a Mentor; and
the weight of the responsibility attaching to my report was not exactly
reassuring. The packet was crowded, for many were desirous of making use
of the last week or two of fine still weather, before the November gales
should begin to expend their fury upon the vast breadth of the Atlantic.
There were but few Britons on board; but there were Dons in abundance;
and great numbers of pallid ladies, with Parisian toilettes and faulty
teeth, and of sallow lean-visaged men in tail-coats and varnished boots,
returning from a tour of European baths and cities. Also, there were
plenty of keen-looking persons, who eyed all mankind with suspicious
scrutiny, who had memorandum-books sticking out of the pockets of their
black satin vests, and who were probably not unconnected with commercial
pursuits and the cotton trade. Aware that I was on my way to a new world
in more senses of the word than one, a world whose standard of morality
was wholly novel, I took every opportunity of acquiring information
which might afterwards prove invaluable. I therefore associated
exclusively with natives of the Western Continent, studied their
sentiments, and stored up every scrap of information bearing on traffic
and transit. I will own that my pride met with frequent abrasions; that
my deepest-rooted convictions were rudely assaulted; and that I was
unable to avoid observing that my neighbours would have been all the
better for a little more attention to the precepts of Lord Chesterfield.
We are not always very fastidious in the city: I am constantly obliged
to bargain, dine, and converse, with uncommonly rough diamonds; but I do
not think that any Cockney alive can contrive to render vulgarity so
glaringly offensive as his Yankee congener. I was most unlucky in my
fellow-passengers, some of whose habits were distressing to a degree,
and did not show any remarkable improvement since the days when Mrs
Trollope and Captain Hamilton crossed the Atlantic. I began to owe Sir
Walter a grudge for his discovery of tobacco, since tobacco, chewed to
pulp, and lubricating the deck and cabin-stairs with its nicotian
extract, became the bugbear of my existence. Besides, I prefer to see
gentlemen sit with their feet in a more normal position than an undue
elevation of the boot soles can afford. I wish our transatlantic
brothers would smoke a little less and wash a little more; and I never
could entirely pardon young Mr Tips for whittling my portmanteau. Mr
Tips—young Mr Tips, that is—Minos Blackstone Story Tips—was the sharer
of what was facetiously called my state-room. The latter was a wedge of
a cabin, with two little berths in it, not quite so spacious as the
box-beds in an old-fashioned Highland cottage, and was naturally meant
to accommodate two passengers. Under ordinary circumstances, Colonel
Sling would have held divided empire over this den with myself; and I
believe that, in strict justice, the whole should have been mine, seeing
that I had signed the cheque in payment for both passages. But berths
were at a premium: several passengers had come on board at the last, and
had to shift for their quarters as they might, and among them the Tips
family. Now, although the “state-room” was rightfully mine, yet I was
easily induced to permit the installation of young Mr Tips in the
undermost berth, though I admit that my temper was sorely tested when I
found him in bed, one rather blusterous afternoon, very sick, and
beguiling the tedious hours, by operating with a sharp penknife on the
glossy leather of my new portmanteau—Allen’s best, fitted for India and
the colonies. Also this delightful youth—a lawyer from the cradle, as
his names imply—was fond of using my pet razor, and borrowing my
scissors and brushes; was not over partial to soap and water; and sang
queer nasal songs at untimely hours, besides smoking in bed. I might
have had a pleasanter companion, but I had let him in, and there was no
help for it, while, after all, the voyage was but for ten days. Why had
I let him in? For two reasons: firstly, because exclusiveness is most
unpopular among Republicans; and the old sentiment which dictated the
New York proverb, that “A man must be a hog to want a bed all to
himself,” still exists in a modified form. Another reason was, that I
wanted to make friends, and get letters of introduction to some Western
citizens who would be able to tell me all about the Nauvoo and Nebraska
Railway, and perhaps a little about Colonel Sling. I knew that
Americans, amongst each other at least, were most generous in this
respect. I was aware that few retired storekeepers or land-jobbers
brought over their charming families without being provided with
introductions from ex-ministers and secretaries to half the peers and
princes of Europe; that American diplomacy was subservient to any one
who could influence an election; and that very queer folks indeed had
the honour of figuring at royal levees and state balls under the wing of
Franklin’s eagle. I determined, therefore, to be as conciliatory as
possible in all my dealings with the citizens and citizenesses of the
model commonwealth.
I had the pleasure of making acquaintance with old Mr Tips,—Judge Tips,
of Salem, Mass.—his Christian name was Magnentius,—in rather a curious
manner. He sat next to me at the general dinner in the best cabin or
saloon. The table was crowded, but there were three below me, on the
same side of the long board. The dinner was a capital one: the Cunard
directors are famous for good feeding; and Judge Tips, father to my
young companion, played an excellent knife and fork. A dish of peas came
round, the last of the marrow-fats, the latest peas of summer; and
indeed I cannot conceive from what remote market the steamboat purveyors
had imported them, seeing that Covent Garden had been barren, in respect
to this vegetable, for some weeks. I am very fond of peas, and was
rejoiced to see my favourites once again; and I anxiously awaited their
arrival. Miss Tips, Miss Julia Tips, and Tips _mère_, as the French
would say, had each taken a decorous spoonful from the flying dish, and
now the black waiter was offering the delicacy to Tips himself, enough
being left for five persons at least. What was my horror to behold the
Judge deliberately monopolise the whole—sweep, as I live, every pea into
his own plate—and then turning to me, with a greasy smile, remark, “I
guess, stranger, I’m a whale at peas.”[4] Yes, Mr Bright tells sterling
truth. There are some matters in which the most acquisitive of us all
are distanced by an American. Judge Tips was obliging enough to favour
me with a good deal of his improving conversation, and by meekness and
affability I won his heart. He not only invited me to visit him at
Salem, but when I hinted that I was on my way to the West, and should be
glad to make the acquaintance of any notable citizens of Illinois or
Iowa, he gave me the coveted letters of introduction to more than one
magistrate, sheriff, and popular preacher. Nor did any accident mar the
even tenor of our agreeable passage to New York. We had almost uniform
good weather; and before the evening of the eleventh day, we were
standing on the wooden landing-places of the Empire City, surrounded by
German porters, Irish car-drivers, and Yankee touts. The latter race,
wise in their generation, prefer head-work to the toil of actual muscle,
and permit old Europe to furnish them with soldiers and foremast-men,
stevedores, navvies, and dock labourers; while they supply officers,
foremen, mates, and overlookers, to regulate and profit by the exertions
of their hirelings.
The Astor House is not what it was. It has been distanced by more
gigantic competitors; and as for the Tremont, it is left high and dry,
like a stranded whale, by the tide of fashion. Nevertheless, I bestowed
my patronage on the latter, perhaps for Sam Slick’s sake, and spent a
couple of days under its hospitable roof while recovering from the
sensation of cramp, tedium, and nausea quite inseparable from a sea
voyage. Then I set out for the West. The journey, as far as Fort
Madison, on the western boundary of the State of Illinois, I performed
by railway, expeditiously perhaps, and not very uncomfortably, in spite
of the amount of rocking and swinging due to a carelessly-metalled
“permanent way,” if I may employ the phraseology of engineering. But I
could not, with a clear conscience, agree with the enthusiastic comments
of my fellow-travellers, as to the immense superiority, in speed and
accommodation, of American railroads over those of Britain. After being
jolted and swung till one’s bones ached, all the time, perhaps, being at
a net speed of thirty miles an hour, it was rather provoking to listen
to such remarks as the following:—
“Wall, mister, I expect our flying locomotives do rayther astonish you.
They kinder take the conceit out of Old England, I some think.” Or, more
gravely, “I believe, sir, it’s pretty universally admitted that America
whips the world for speed. We have beaten your yachts, we have licked
your racers, and our trains must make you think small beer of your
expresses. We go ahead, _we_ do!”
I take great praise to myself that I was always able to keep my temper,
and to abstain from polemics. But argument would have been useless. I
had to do with a people who saw the outer world through the spectacles
of their journalists, and who would no more admit the imperfections of
America than a lover will see a blemish in his mistress. To them America
was all in all; and the mightiest countries in Europe were esteemed by
them as rotten and worthless, only existing by the sufferance of the
Giant Republic. As for my praise of the British Constitution, they
simply laughed at it, assuring me that I knew nothing about the matter,
and that there could be no liberty where a plain man was not allowed to
go to court in his working dress if he chose. But I had not crossed the
ocean to argue: I had come to pluck out the heart of the mystery
concerning the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. And I was very careful at
dinner-tables, bars, cafés, and railway cars, to elicit all available
information with respect to the resources of the West. What I heard was,
of course, vague; but on the whole it contained some comfort. It
appeared certain that a great trade was carried on by land and water;
that towns started up with incredible quickness in the midst of desolate
prairies, or, like Chicago, on piles in a swamp; and that hardy men were
taming the wilderness. So far so good. But it did not appear to me that
security to life and property went in exactly the same ratio as the
increase of wealth. I heard odd stories about regulators, vigilance
committees, and Judge Lynch. Mob-law seemed paramount to written
statutes; and the fiat of a legal court required to be backed by the
good pleasure of a majority before its execution could be guaranteed.
Besides, the moral standard of the community did not rank as high as
perhaps a very delicate sense of honour required. Commercial tricks were
spoken of as “clever,” or “ingenious,” which in other lands would have
engaged the serious attention of the law-officers of the Crown; and the
most unprincipled ruse was mentioned with laughter and indulgence, if
not with approbation. All this augured badly, methought, for the
prospects of the Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. And yet I did not despair,
and still less did I drop a hint of my suspicions to any casual
acquaintance. It was not for me, a managing director, to denounce the
project with which my name was, alas! inextricably linked, until it
should be proved a bubble on the very clearest evidence. I reached Fort
Madison, the most remote point to which the steam-horse could convey me,
and had, at any rate, the satisfaction of knowing that I was within a
few miles of Nauvoo. I hired a mule-waggon for the journey, and sitting
down to dinner at the public table of the hotel, I inquired what sort of
a place Nauvoo might be?
“Nauvoo, mister,” said a tall gaunt man whom his friends addressed as
“Major,” “Nauvoo is a pretty considerable sprig of a city. It is a tall
place, sir. There air good points and great developments about Nauvoo.
Do you settle down there, stranger? I could sell you a lot of land awful
cheap.”
“Thank you,” said I, “I have no intention of becoming a resident at
Nauvoo; I merely wish to visit it.”
“I see,” observed another guest; “you want to have a peep at the great
temple the Mormons built before Joe Smith was shot at Springfield.
’Tain’t much you’ll see, though, stranger, for the place is all to ruin.
The bhoys were not soft enough to let so much cedar-pine and dressed
limestone stand, when houses were costing hat-fulls of dollars. But
Nauvoo has some fine bluffs, con-sidered aiqual to any scenery the old
Rhine can show.”
“Air you in the hardware line? If so, we might trade, I guess;” said a
little man at my elbow.
“No, no;” I returned, “my journey is not of a commercial character,
exactly.”
“Political, eh?” asked the Major: “picking up news, perhaps, for your
Downing Street wiseacres, and feeling Uncle Sam’s pulse to know when the
old gentleman is at fever heat, eh, mister?”
“Not at all,” said I; “I have no mission of the sort; nor, indeed, do I
believe the British Government to entertain any peculiar anxiety on the
subject you mention.”
A cough and shrug of disapprobation pervaded the assembly.
“It is well known, sir,” said the tall Major, “that the Government of
your benighted land is ever on the watch for the expression of American
opinion. American opinion, sir, has great weight in your House of
Commons.”
“I was not aware of it, I give you my word;” I answered with a smile.
“Perhaps not, sir, perhaps not,” replied the Major, pityingly. “Do you
never read the ‘Evening Planet,’ sir, when you are at home?”
I winced. The truth was, that I _did_ take in the ‘Evening Planet,’ and
heedfully perused therein the valuable dicta of its eloquent proprietor,
a celebrated parliamentary and platform orator. And I had been
accustomed to give credence to the confident assurance of this
gentleman, that we were miles behind the Northern States of the American
Union in all that was useful and good, and that we could not do better
than copy so shining a model in all things. I had read and heard the
bold statement, made in defiance of statistics, that America was
floating peacefully on the tide of prosperity into the haven of
universal empire—an empire won by bloodless means, of course; for what
nation, unsaddled with an aristocracy, would dream of war, while Britain
was sinking into decrepitude and decay! All this, and much more, had I
heard and read, and I had believed that Britannia ought to sit at the
feet of her flighty offspring for instruction, and to remodel her old
institutions after a republican pattern. But, as not seldom happens, a
nearer view of the United States did not precisely confirm the loud
assertions of the Americanising party in the British press and senate,
and I was gradually losing my ideal admiration for transatlantic liberty
and customs. After the rapid dinner, and the more leisurely supplement
of juleps and brandy-cobblers imbibed in the bar-room of the hotel, I
asked a coloured waiter if my waggon and mules were forthcoming, as I
was desirous of reaching Nauvoo before dark.
“Iss, massa!” answered the negro, and whisked off with his napkin to
inquire after the lingering equipage.
The Major said he was going to Nauvoo too, and begged the favour of a
lift, which I willingly conceded.
The mules and waggon, with their whipcracking teamster, soon rattled up
to the door; my bill was promptly paid, my baggage transferred to the
vehicle; the Major and I climbed into our places, and we started.
“How comes it, Major,” said I, “that there is no line open to Nauvoo?”
The Major knocked the ashes off his cigar as he replied, “Wall, I
suppose it wouldn’t pay. Rail to Fort Madison is all right and spry,
because Uncle Sam has property there; but I guess not a dime could be
drawed from Washington treasury to make a line on to Nauvoo.”
“And from Nauvoo, westward through Iowa, say to Nebraska,” observed I,
with affected carelessness; “what should you say to the prospects of a
railroad in that direction?”
My heart throbbed audibly as I spoke, for all my feigned indifference,
and I listened with anxiety for the Major’s reply. I had not long to
wait.
“That depends,” said my fellow-traveller, with sagacious deliberation,
“on the sort of rail you talk about. Is it a line to go no farther than
Wall Street, and perhaps your London Capel Court, that you are speaking
of, mister?”
“Wall Street and Capel Court! Upon my life, I hardly comprehend you,”
returned I.
“Moonshine, flummery, make-believe, sleepers, rails, stations, all of
paper, _that’s_ what I mean, stranger;” rejoined the Major, somewhat
impatiently.
“But I spoke of a _bona fide_ concern—of a real railway, honestly made
and fairly worked,” answered I; “what would you say to that?”
“Say!” replied the Major, with infinite contempt, “say! Let me see the
gonies. Trot ’em up to me, sir. Just let me have a look at the simple
ones that are at the head of the business, and I’ll tell them what I
think, fast enough. No, Nauvoo is a rising place, a neat location, but
it can wait for a rail one while, unless every sage plant on the prairie
turns to silver dollars.”
After this I asked the Major no more questions. We reached Nauvoo, and
through the dusk I espied the shingled roofs of its houses, the bold
bluffs of limestone, the rushing coffee-coloured river, and the
unfinished building-lots with their heaps of wreck and rubbish. We put
up at the General Jackson Hotel. I had a letter of introduction to
Squire Park of Nauvoo, a gentleman in the flatboat interest, who owed
his title of Squire to his being in the commission of the peace. But on
repairing to his house I was doomed to disappointment—the more vexatious
because Mr Park had been eulogised by Judge Tips as a man who knew the
West thoroughly. Squire Park was gone to Cairo on business, and was not
expected back before the end of the month. On consulting the map I
carried, I found that a place called Keosauque was the nearest of the
few towns in Iowa to the line of railway, real or imaginary, in
connection with which my name, and those of other men of respectability
and substance, were flaming, in advertisements and on the broadsheets of
a prospectus, throughout the British metropolis. I set off to Keosauque,
mounted on an Indian pony, and accompanied by a guide in the shape of a
wiry backwoodsman, in an enduring costume of leather, and who gave
accommodation to my portmanteau behind his saddle. For some miles we
rode in silence over the apparently boundless sea of grass, mottled with
weeds and flowers, and occasionally studded with lone farmhouses and
maize fields, or by herds of grazing cattle. Those half-reclaimed
mustangs are not the most pleasant mount for a timid rider, nor am I,
George Bulkeley of Stamford Hill, a very adventurous horseman; and
before we had got far, I began to wish the brute I rode would desist
from what seemed an alternation of starts and stumbles. My guide, a
good-humoured wild man, observed my embarrassment, and undertook its
removal.
“See here, Colonel,” said he—strangers in the West are usually decorated
with visionary epaulettes—“you mustn’t keep the rein so slack as that,
nor yet hold your hand up level with your cravat, or, scalp me, but
you’ll be spilt! Mustangs want a tight grip on the bit. So—steady now.
Stick in your knees, Colonel, and scorn to ketch hold of the pummel—so.
Do as you see me do; give him a touch of the spur, but mind his
kicking—for mustangs _can_ kick, they can. You’ll do nicely, now.”
Ichabod was a skilful riding-master, by instinct, I suppose; and, thanks
to his forcible instructions, I was soon on better terms with my
refractory quadruped. On we rode, over the waving grass, through the
rank weeds, through the belts of cottonwood timber and maples that
skirted every streamlet, and past the swampy bottoms where sluggish
waters wound like wounded snakes. We dined on dried venison, jerked
beef, parched corn, and hominy, at a farm which did duty for an inn, and
slept at another house of the same character. Next day we resumed our
route; and as we rode towards Keosauque, I ventured to ask Ichabod if he
had ever heard of the Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. I had been
hitherto averse to propounding this query; for how could I tell whether
the interests of my informant might conflict with mine?—but with this
rough frontiersman I felt I was safe. He, at least, was no rival
speculator—no shareholder in a competing line—no steamboat proprietor,
or lord of many stage-waggons. But his first answer was not
satisfactory. It was comprised in the one word, “Anan!”
“The Railway”—asked I again—“from Nauvoo to Nebraska: not a finished
thing, of course; but you surely must have seen or heard of the
works—the bridges, the embankments, and the rest of the preparations?”
Ichabod shook his head. “You’re talking Greek to me, Colonel, and that
air a fact.”
“How is it possible,” cried I, in an agony, “that there can have been a
railway begun in this country, and the settlers unaware of it? Surely
you must be a stranger to this part of the State yourself!”
“You’re wrong there, Colonel,” answered Ichabod; “I’m Illinois born, but
I’m Iowa bred. In this State I was raised; and I don’t believe there’s a
thing happened over the border sin’ I could mount a horse, be it buffler
or deer, loping Indian, runaway nigger, or Yankee pedlar, without my
hearing on’t. Stop” (and he smote his knee with a palm as hard as
iron)—“I’ve got it. You’re talking of Harvey’s Folly.”
And I thought the young backwoodsman would have tumbled off his horse in
the extravagant burst of mirth which this discovery produced.
“Who-whoop!” cried he; “I’ve seen queer sights, but never did I think to
see a stranger come out in a bee-line from the old country—no offence,
Colonel!—to ax about Harvey’s Folly. I’d nigh forgot that the thing
existed at all. Wah! but it beats coon-catching!”
With some trouble I got an explanation. It appeared from the borderer’s
statement that, years ago, a speculative individual of the name of
Harvey had undertaken to construct a railway from Nebraska to Nauvoo,
with a branch linking it to the Central Illinois line. He had obtained
the usual charter and grant of land from the State, and had actually
commenced operations between Keosauque and New Buda, two little towns
not far from the Missouri boundary. But he had soon desisted from the
Sisyphean task, ruined, disheartened, or disappointed of the aid on
which he had somewhat sanguinely reckoned; and thenceforth no more had
been said of the scheme or the schemer. “But the property,” groaned I,
“the works, surely _they_ must remain?”
“Why,” said Ichabod, meditatively, “I kinder think there’s rails laid
down a bit—yes, for some miles I guess, and they’ll be there still. The
cussed Indians can’t have stampedoed them, like they do the cattle.
There’s a tidy bridge over a creek or two Harvey built, and some sheds
and scantling; and that’s about all.”
“All,” said I, “think again, Ichabod. Surely there must be more plant
than that, and then the rolling stock?”
The frontiersman laughed. “We know more about gunstocks than rolling
stocks, out here on the pararas,” said he; “and I never heard of plants,
onless ’twas hickory or sumach. But I’ve kinder catalogued the hull
fixings for you, Colonel, without ’tis a pile of rusty iron, or a few
waggon-loads of logs—neat bits of oak timber they were, trimmed and
dressed, and shaped mighty like a saddle-tree, that Harvey left on the
ground.”
“The sleepers, I suppose,” returned I; “are they there still?”
“Well, Colonel, mebbe some of ’em are taking a nap there still,” replied
Ichabod, “but parara men often camp thereabouts, hunting,
cattle-tending, or prospecting, and firewood being mortal scarce on the
plains, ’twasn’t to be expected the bhoys wouldn’t make free with some
chips to cook with. I may have had a chop at those logs with my
tomahawk, when I wanted a broil, onst or twice, myself.”
I groaned again. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway was evidently as
brittle a speculation as Alnaschar’s basket of glass. I finished the
ride to Keosauque in moody reverie. There was no other guest to share
such rugged plenty as the wooden tavern, called by courtesy the Eagle
Hotel, could afford; and as the landlord was absent, and the landlady
busy in the management of her children and Irish helps, no one talked to
me, and I sat sullen and dejected the whole evening. Next day, tired as
I was, I set out again, under Ichabod’s guidance, to visit what he
persisted in naming Harvey’s Folly. We reached the spot at last. A
swampy level, intersected by runlets of water, and with a good deal of
thorny brake, and here and there a clump of cottonwood poplars
diversifying the scene, had been selected by Mr Harvey for the site of
his preliminary operations. Why he had chosen that wet ground at all,
when so much dry prairie lay beyond, of very tolerable smoothness, it is
difficult to conjecture; but perhaps the more accurate level had tempted
him. There were rails, certainly there were rails, half-hidden by the
growth of hemlocks and rank grass; but on dismounting I discovered that,
for lack of proper metal trams, the rails had been constructed of
_wood_, covered with a thin slip of iron—not an unusual device in
out-of-the-way parts of America, as I was afterwards told. The
fastenings were very defective, the sleepers loose, and the whole
concern had a crazy haphazard look. Such as they were, these precious
rails were continued for about 5 miles—5 miles out of 350!—and then they
terminated in a mass of ruin and confusion. There were roofless sheds,
scantlings and screens blown down by hurricane gusts, heaps of rusty
iron, broken tools, damaged wheelbarrows, and a shattered truck with
only one wheel left. Also there were a quantity of sleepers of dressed
oak, and the fragments of many more, split by the axe and charred to
coal, as they lay around the blackened spots of burnt turf, where many a
camp-fire had been lit by the frontiersmen. That was all the valuable
property left at the disposal of the directors. The sight sickened me.
“Harvey’s Folly,” muttered I between my teeth, “say rather Bulkeley’s
Folly—Bulkeley’s credulity, idiocy, weakness! And not only mine, but Tom
Harris’s, and that of all of us. What a long-eared pack were we to be
lured by the crafty piping of such a dissembling knave as that glib
Colonel!” I rode away, sad and careworn. Ichabod’s quaint talk was
unnoticed. I had another companion that claimed my undivided attention,
and that was Care, Black Care, which sat crouching behind my saddle. I
was haunted by a ghastly phantom of impending bankruptcy. The London
Gazette spread its ill-omened sheet before me, and in its fatal columns
I read, in flaming characters, “George Bulkeley, of Cannon Street in the
City of London, and Stamford Hill, Middlesex, to surrender at Portugal
Street on Monday the 14th inst. Official Assignee, Mr Wilks!” That it
should have come to this! Ruin, ruin, ruin. Ruin and disgrace to us all,
the duped directors of this wretched swindle. Were we not responsible
for the debts of the undertaking? Was not the paid-up capital in the
treacherous hands of our Yankee cashier, Dr Titus A. C. Bett, and could
there be a doubt that it was lost for ever? Plainly the whole business
was a fraudulent trick from the first—a net to catch gold-fish! Ah!
already with my mind’s eye I saw the broker’s men in possession of
Magnolia Villa; I saw my costly furniture, the cellar of wines I had
been so proud of, carriages, pictures, everything, submitted to public
competition by a smirking auctioneer. I heard the hammer fall, knocking
down my Lares and Penates to the highest bidder. Going, going, gone! the
accursed formula rang in my ears with baleful clearness. Magnolia
Cottage to let! My family hiding in poor lodgings in Boulogne! George
Bulkeley, a moody bankrupt, slinking about the pier of that refuge for
insolvency, and afraid to face the Stock Exchange! Even though the Court
might declare me blameless, even though the commissioner might whitewash
me into commercial purity, my conscience was less complaisant, and
sternly refused me even a third-class certificate.
I might have had the right to ruin myself and family, but what right had
I to make desolate the hearths of many helpless and confiding people?
How about those shareholders ignorant of business, those pinched vicars,
needy widows, poor old half-pay officers, and the rest, who had been
dazzled by our prospectus, and had invested their savings in the pocket
of Dr Titus A. C. Bett? It was my respectable name, in common with those
of my fellows in the Direction, which had baited the hook for such poor
prey as these. My heart—even City men have hearts sometimes—was heavy
and mournful with a grief not wholly selfish. Plump! fluff! down went
the mustang on his knees, his feet having plunged into the holes that
led to the dwellings of some “prairie-dogs”—interesting little brutes
that burrow all over the plains—and over the animal’s head I flew with
the force of a sky-rocket. Lighting with a great thump on the hard turf,
I ran no trifling risk of a broken neck; but my hat saved me, at the
expense of its own demolition, and I was only stunned. But when Ichabod
hurried to the rescue he found me bruised and faint, and with a sprained
thumb that caused me exquisite pain for the time. So stupified was I by
the shock, that I did not hear the beat of hoofs upon the green carpet
of the prairie, nor the sound of friendly voices, and was surprised, on
looking up, to see that I was surrounded by a large party of
equestrians, who were surveying me from the saddle with every appearance
of interest. Riding-habits and side-saddles here in prairie-land! hats
and feathers, too, of most ladylike elegance, and a pair of pretty,
rather pale faces under the shadow of those plumed felts. Besides the
two girls, there were a grey-haired elderly man, two younger gentlemen,
and three or four mounted blacks in suits of striped cotton, one of whom
led a couple of hounds in a long leash, while another had a buck
strapped behind him on the horse.
“Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” asked one of the young ladies in a
sweet kind voice. Ichabod, as bold as a lion in general, was awkward and
bashful when addressed by a lady, and seemed to be weighing the words of
his answer, when I felt it necessary to reply for myself. On discovering
that I was a stranger in the land, General Warfield insisted that I
should accompany the party to his house, just across the Missouri
border, where my injured thumb should receive every attention, and where
he and his family would gladly welcome me. Yielding willingly to this
hospitable persuasion, I permitted Ichabod and one of the negroes to
help me to remount my mustang, and we rode towards the Missouri
boundary. The family whose acquaintance I had just made in so singular a
way, bore no similarity to the travelling Americans whom it had
previously fallen to my lot to encounter. General Warfield, his son,
daughters, and nephew, had the well-bred air and unobtrusive demeanour
which I had hitherto deemed exclusively insular. They asked me no abrupt
questions as to my station or errand: they indulged in no diatribes
against my country, nor in any extravagant laudations of their own; and
I might have fancied myself the guest of some long-descended family at
home, but for the wild scenes and unusual objects that met my eye as we
rode along. It turned out that General Warfield, a retired military
officer, _not_ a militiaman, was of an old Virginian family, and had
migrated to the newer soil of Missouri six years ago. There his children
had grown to be men and women, in the hardy habits of that wild country,
a mere outpost of civilisation; and indeed they were returning from a
hunting expedition into Iowa when they stumbled upon me in my prostrate
condition. Three hours’ ride brought us to the General’s house, a large
building of mingled wood and stone, with a pretty garden on one hand,
and on the other the farm-buildings, the corrals for horses and cattle,
and the negro huts. Within I found furniture of old-fashioned dark
mahogany, partridge-wood, and bird’s-eye maple, old family pictures,
pretty knickknacks picked up during a three years’ residence in Europe,
and the massive silver plate which had been handed down from father to
son ever since the ancestral Warfield settled in Virginia in the reign
of Charles I. I never knew anything so _un_-American, in respect to the
usual standard of comparison, as the mode of life, the bearing, and
tastes, of General Warfield and his high-spirited and amiable children.
Here was no exaggeration of sentiment, no outrageous national vanity, no
rude indifference to the feelings of others, no prying, no pretension. I
felt, as I conversed with them, how wide was the gulf that severed the
North from the South. It was not diversity of interest alone, but
diversity of habits, principles, and aspirations. Wide apart in heart
and mind as the poles from each other, the citizens of the opposite ends
of the Union had but the feeble Federal bond to delay that violent
disruption and severance of which, even then, the signs of the times
gave fearful warning. But it is not my purpose to linger on the happy
days I spent beneath the roof of my kind hosts. Let me rather relate the
information I received from General Warfield, when his friendly
hospitality had caused me to confide to his ear my errand to America,
and the ruin I had too much reason to anticipate.
“My dear sir,” said the General, “I am glad you have told me of
this—very glad. I can help you in this matter.”
The General then proceeded to tell me that, in the first year of his
residence in Missouri, Harvey, a notorious speculator, had begun the
railway whose miserable wreck I had visited. He had given it up for want
of funds, had become insolvent, and was reputed to have died in Texas.
That he had received a real concession of land and authentic charters
from the State legislatures, was undoubted. But the concession had been
clogged by the express stipulation, that in two years Harvey should have
a hundred and fifty miles in working order, and that the whole should be
completed in four years. The condition not having been complied with,
the concession was null and void. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway
Company, had no right to a corporate existence.
“But,” said I, “I of course perused the papers. I saw no mention of such
a conditional clause.”
The General smiled.
“Depend upon it, Mr Bulkeley,” said he, “that erasure and forgery have
been practised to make the old deeds sufficiently tempting to effect the
only purpose their present holders have in view—that of raising cash in
the London market. Colonel Sling—who, by the way, is no more a colonel,
even of militia, than black Cæsar there—is no novice at fraud. He was
convicted at Jefferson city of a like offence, and I was present at his
trial, and heard some of his antecedents; indeed, I was a witness in the
case. But if you will take my advice, you will hasten back to England,
and, if possible, save the funds in the hands of this confederate of
his, this Bett, before the pair can abscond with their gains. Do not
parley, but apply to the police at once, if, indeed, it be not too
late.”
Finally, General Warfield was so good as to accompany me to the chief
town of Iowa State, where he introduced me to the legal authorities, by
whom his statements were fully confirmed, and the Nauvoo and Nebraska
declared a transparent swindle. In this town we suddenly came on
“Colonel” Sling, who had come out by the next packet, and was tracking
me, no doubt in the hope of hoodwinking or silencing me in some mode or
other. But when he saw the General, his swaggering air collapsed, a
guilty crimson suffused his yellow cheeks, and he slunk away and entered
a tavern without accosting us. And yet when, after giving hearty thanks
to my kindly Virginian friend, I hurried to embark at New York, I had
the honour of finding Colonel Coriolanus Sling, my fellow-passenger. He
now ventured to address me, but by this time I was on my guard against
his specious eloquence, and he retired with an air of mingled effrontery
and shame. At Liverpool, as I took my seat in the train, which I did
without the loss of a moment, I saw Colonel Sling dart into the
telegraph office. So busy was my brain with what was before me, that I
did not, during the principal part of the journey, attach any particular
meaning to this proceeding of my treacherous ally. When I _did_ think of
its probable object, I struck my forehead, and could have cursed my
blind stupidity, my dulness of conception. After all my haste,
scampering as quickly as possible to the station at Liverpool, was I to
be too late, after all? Was this Yankee rascal to be permitted to warn
his brother knave in London through my inattention, and was the paid-up
capital to fatten the two harpies whose tools we had been? Heavy
misgivings filled my heart as I arrived in London, hurried to Scotland
Yard, and requested that a detective policeman might at once be ordered
to accompany me to the residence of Dr Titus A. C. Bett, cashier to the
Nauvoo and Nebraska Company. Luckily I was a man of credit and character
in the city; my request was granted instantly, and off whirled the
hansom cab, as fast as hansom cab could be impelled by the most lavish
bribe, on its way to Piccadilly, bearing me and a quiet man with a
resolute, thoughtful face, in plain clothes. Ha! there is a cab waiting
at the door as we jump out—I hot and breathless, the policeman cool and
steady. The gaping servant-girl belonging to the lodgings comes quickly
at our knock. It is morning yet, early morning, from a London point of
view—not much after nine.
“Is Dr Bett in?”
“Yes, sir,” replies the girl, “but he’s just a-going. He sent me out for
the cab five minutes ago, and he’s called away so sudden he won’t take
breakfast.”
“Ah, indeed!” says the detective; “telegram, I suppose, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the maid, “and he swore hawful because I hadn’t woke
him up directly it came, two hour ago, along with the milk, but I didn’t
dare, ’cause he always stops out late, and always swears and scolds if I
bring up his hot water before nine o’clock.”
I could have hugged that maid, Mary Ann, Eliza, or Susan, no matter
what, for she was my preserver—a most valuable but unwitting ally. I did
give her a sovereign as I bade her show us up. We found the Doctor,
unshaved, half dressed, tugging at his boots, and with a leather
dressing-case weighty with gold and notes lying on the table at his
elbow. We rushed in with scant ceremony. The detective tapped him on the
shoulder and took him into custody with the magic formula of uttering
her Majesty’s name. The bubble burst, but the funds were saved; and
after some expense, ridicule, and trouble, we were able to return their
money to the shareholders, and I washed my hands most gladly of my
American investment.
THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN PAINTINGS.
“Und aber nach zweitausend Jahren
Kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.”
“Et puis nous irons voir, car décadence et deuil
Viennent toujours après la puissance et l’orgueil,
Nous irons voir....”
We are so much accustomed to depend on the four great literary languages
for the whole body of our information and amusement, that it occurs to
few to consider that ignorance of other European dialects involves any
inconvenience at all, except to those who have occasion to visit the
countries in which they are spoken. Yet there is much of really valuable
matter which sees the light only in the minor tongues, especially those
of the industrious North, and with which the world has never been made
familiar through translation. Joachim Frederic Schouw, the Danish
botanist, is one of the writers of our day who has suffered most
prejudicially both to his own fame and to the public from having
employed only his native language. For his writings are not only
valuable in a scientific point of view, but belong to the most popular
order of scientific writing, and would assuredly have been general
favourites, had not the bulk of them remained untranslated. His ‘Tableau
du Climat de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared in French, and is a
standard work. A little collection of very brief and popular essays,
entitled ‘The Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been translated both into
German and English. One of these, styled ‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is
founded on a rather novel idea. The paintings on the walls of the
disinterred houses of that city contain (among other things) many
landscape compositions. Sometimes these are accessory to historical
representations. But they often merely portray the scenery of ordinary
out-door life. The old decorators of the Pompeian chambers had indeed an
evident taste for those trivial tricks of theatrical deception, which
are still very popular in Italy. Their verdure, sky, and so forth, seem
often as if meant to impose on the spectator for a moment as realities;
and are, therefore, executed in a “realistic” though sketchy style.
“Consequently,” says Schouw, “the observation of the plants which are
represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure
of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show
the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the
Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns
them now.”
We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant
little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to
this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most
regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the
appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of
volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken
place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and
land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very
outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were.
Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from
his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama
of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and
note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he
beheld it.
The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was
Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable
with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with
its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was
devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its
appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke
rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that
red gleam of the slow river of fire,
“A cui riluce
Di Capri la marina
E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.”
It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it
exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top;
Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped
ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to
be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical
depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and
tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long
before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to
the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must
have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very
similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.
At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to
record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of
Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic
action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of
Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the
imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since
transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he
first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of
unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his
resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August,
which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment,
except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the
Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he
relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old
prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have
attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen
up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a
level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular
oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here
and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his
conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or
mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the
fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and
cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible
name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di
Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents,
gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had
crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with
the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its
premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes
his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very
closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631.
Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered
feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that
the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and
renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says
Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was
heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and
battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the
precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals
were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo”
(so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a
contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the
mountain. There, without having taken a mouthful of anything, he was
overtaken by a profound slumber, from which awakening suddenly, he saw
no longer before his eyes the likeness of the place where he had fallen
asleep, but a new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape: instead of a
hill-side covered with wood, there appeared a wall crossing the road,
and extending on each side for a great distance, with a very lofty gate.
Astonished at this new scene, he went to the gate to inquire where he
was. There he found a porter of the order of St Francis, a young man in
appearance. Many conjecture that this was St Antony of Padua. The porter
at first seemed to repulse him, but afterwards admitted him into the
courtyard, and guided him about. After a long circuit they arrived at a
great range of buildings breathing fire from every window.” In short,
the poor peasant was conducted, after the fashion of such visions,
through the mansions of hell and purgatory, where he saw, of course,
many of his acquaintance variously tormented. “At last, on the following
day, he was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius: and was ordered to
inform his countrymen that a great ruin was impending over them from
that mountain: wherefore they should address their vows and prayers to
God. On Easter Day, at noon, he came home, and was observed of many with
his dress sprinkled with ashes, his face burnt black, as if escaped from
a fire.” This was two years before the eruption, and during the interval
Camillo always told the same story; wherefore, after passing a long time
for either mad or drunk, he was finally raised to the dignity of a
prophet. At last, on the night of the 15th December, the ancient volcano
signalised his awakening by a feat of unrivalled grandeur. In
forty-eight hours of terrific struggles, he blew away the whole cap of
the mountain; so that, on the morning of the 18th, when the smoke at
last subsided, the Neapolitans beheld their familiar summit a thousand
feet lower than it had been before; while its southern face was seamed
by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly rolling at several points into
the sea.
Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems
to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now,
in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made
the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on
Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or
two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances
on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions
prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed,
the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been
that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in
company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising
all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately
pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its
subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious
traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer
every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking
with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting
catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of
the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood,
which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and
first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale
seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its
fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once
more the danger passed away.
To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it
except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories
respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful
panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes
since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth
of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not
exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a
deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of
Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of
its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the
limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged
by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which
lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the
opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how
or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the
long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many
feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived
magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the
chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf
of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its
luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived.
Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity,
was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for
everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the _malaria_.
But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore.
The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the
summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet
land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were,
doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the
shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its
steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into
land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the
whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of
Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently
delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as
beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision
which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of
landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena
exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical
records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic
region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or
rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven
centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place
until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these
marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their
owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and
sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in
their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had
reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their
disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has
modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them.
Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all
events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of
the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at
any other epoch of the world’s history.
Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called
her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet
acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far
less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some
twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural
estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate
del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the
sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of
which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the
sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower
storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But
instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the
cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces
erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge,
even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here,
however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island
or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the
continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have
dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature
on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was
a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli
to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of
cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the
common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have
been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder
neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems
as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting
hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only
three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether
by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful
Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of
Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a
narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach,
between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has
remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the
very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along
which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on
which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the
dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at
least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone
in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by
forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and
retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal
to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather,
it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is
not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the
lake _of_ the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is
a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds
which fly over it fall dead on the earth _or_ into the lake if there
happens to be a lake below them.
“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”
And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same
meaning.
“Spelunca alta fuit....
....tuta lacu nigro nemorum que tenebris,
_Quam_ super” (not quem super, over the cavern, not the lake)
....“haud ullæ poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis....
Unde _locum_” (not _lacum_) “Graii dixerunt nomine Aornon.”
It was the exhalations from the mysterious cavern that were deadly, not
those from the lake. Such an “Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or Valley of
Death, in Java, to which condemned criminals were formerly sent to
perish; whence the romance about the Upas Tree. And such an Avernus, on
a small scale, still exists on the shore of the peaceful little Lake of
Laach in Germany, also an extinct crater: there are spots on its beach
where bird-corpses are to be found in numbers, killed by mephitic
exhalations. But—to return to our lake—it must at that time have lain at
or (like some other extinct craters) below the level of the sea; for
Augustus’s great engineering operation consisted in letting the sea
_into_ the lake.
“Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur æstus Avernis.”
Fifteen hundred years afterwards, and just before the Monte Nuovo
eruption, the place was visited by that painful old topographer, Leandro
Alberti, the Leland of Italy. The channel made by Augustus was then
gone; but the lake was still on a level with the sea, for he asserts
that in storms the sea broke into it: and the water, as he expressly
affirms, was salt. Now, its level is several feet above that of the sea,
and the water is fresh. The upheaval must have been gradual and
peaceful, for the outline of the lonely mere is as perfectly rounded now
as the poet Lycophron described it;—but a portion only of that
bewildering succession of changes of which this coast has been the
theatre: the latest vibration of that vast commotion figured in the
legendary war of the Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a conjecture as
some have deemed it, that the tradition which peopled this bright coast
with Cimmerians—then dwellers in the everlasting mist, on the
border-land between the dead and the living—had its origin in the tales
of primeval navigators, who had visited the neighbourhood during some
mighty and prolonged eruption, covering sea and shore with a permanent
darkness which “might be felt:” like the coast of Iceland in 1783, when
for a whole summer continual eruptions arose from the sea as well as the
land: when “the noxious vapours that for many months infected the air,
enveloped the whole island in a dense fog which obscured the sun, and
was perceptible even in England and Holland.”
Still farther westward in our panoramic view, the confusion between past
and present becomes even more undecipherable. Baiæ has disappeared; a
stately city of pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining foundations,
rose on a hillside in terraces, something like its British counterpart
Bath, but with its foot washed by the Mediterranean instead of the Avon:
so has Misenum, with its naval station: and not only are these towns
gone, but the land on which they stood seems so to have changed its
shape, through earthquakes, marine encroachments, and the labour of men,
that its very outlines are altered, until the eye rests at last on the
peak of Ischia, which ends the semicircle.
Thus much by way of introduction to the more immediate point of our
inquiry: the changes in the general aspect and character of the earth’s
vegetable covering which have taken place in the same period of two
thousand years, and in the same locality.
One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and
even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents,
consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of
vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the
sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in
stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true,
no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France
and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of
Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes
to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking
variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient
times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than
now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the
common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily
clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance.
Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches
left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The
beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish
character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful
beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the
vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my
home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with
their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed
northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling
what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than
may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued
existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural
writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the
evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known
pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the
‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But
what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains
where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived.
His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other
bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust
in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a
tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge
oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as
to a _colonus_ of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the
verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is
that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and
myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the
great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the
grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is
difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty
æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which
formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for
antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some
question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or
whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5]
Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the
more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and
the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done
much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime
Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the
evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the
foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of
the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by
both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater
hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence.
Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem
indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more
majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern
temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too
fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the
human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding
aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish
empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but,
in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become
extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and
by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or
intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains
predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it
ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those
hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the
Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They
have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few
problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to
be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among
the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical
Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair,
and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in
Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy,
nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who
now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France,
can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed
of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the
Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and
_cheveux châtains_. “I sought for the fair population of classical
Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On
the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons,
transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have
impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed
the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly
in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard
lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the
“Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they
regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be
threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning
from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands
of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional
vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of
species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of
England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering
only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar,
acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in
general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed
any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign
plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests
which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of
human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the
Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the
following description of the change which two thousand years have made
in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist
(Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—
“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either
entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations
which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more
northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the
Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare
and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains;
the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty
exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of
these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in
the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and
prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich
flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that
of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the
ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes
of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these
we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ,
pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain
regions in general.”
Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the
Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this
“intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the
regions north of the Mediterranean.
In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says
Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its
ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of
the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are
naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be
ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind.
And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it
was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also
occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often
delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the _nelumbium_, the
hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s
edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed
to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations
are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even
appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a
physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that
strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so
close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”
After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following
conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its
character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former
is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and
cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual
pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of
Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones
have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The
beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not
unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the
outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin,
we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the
spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern
buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with
the pointed Gothic. The “_Pinus halepensis_,” adds Schouw (the common
maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of
course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as
universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the
volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved
olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their
taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the
French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add
to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the
“arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various
uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to
the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures.
And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the
eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to
those on which his descendant gazes now.
But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of
which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we
are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the
Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the
familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes
itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to
the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless
sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to
have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty
children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come
over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented
in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly
the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or _chamærops humilis_.”
A still more important want of classical ages was that of the whole
tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians call them—the orange, lemon, citron,
and so forth. “Italy was not then,” says our Professor, “the land
Wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die gold-orangen glühn;”
and was consequently without one of the favourite features with which
æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions of Italy. They are of course
absent from the frescoes. They were known to Pliny as foreign plants
only. The “Median Apple” (citron) was cultivated in Italy no earlier
than the third century after Christ; lemons came from the Saracens;
oranges, last of all, were brought by the Portuguese from the East.
The white, or silk-worm mulberry, now the commonest of all trees in the
richer parts of Italy, was also unknown to the Pompeians. Its
cultivation on the peninsula began, according to Schouw, in the sixth
century. Silken fabrics were scarce and expensive, and imported by the
Romans from the East. Voltaire somewhere makes the great superiority of
a _femme de chambre_ of Madame de Pompadour over the Empress Livia
consist in the unlimited enjoyment of silk stockings. It may, however,
be questioned whether the Empress would have appreciated such a luxury,
or whether, as the audacious French traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted
respecting the Glasgow ladies not many years ago, she would not have got
rid of such incumbrances whenever free from the restraints of company.
The picturesque Carouba tree (_Ceratonia siliqua_), which now forms
groves along many parts of the Italian coast, is also probably of modern
introduction. We may add another more important plant which the
Professor has omitted—the chestnut. Not, of course, that this
magnificent native of Thessaly was unknown to Roman antiquity. It was,
on the contrary, extensively cultivated in ancient Italy for its fruit.
Naples was particularly famous for the excellence of its chestnuts—
“Quas docta Neapolis creavit,
Lento castaneas vapore tostas”—
such as Martial appetisingly describes, and such as that _flâneur_ of a
poet had doubtless often purchased, scalding hot, from the tripod of
some hag-granddaughter of Canidia or Sagana, in the alleys of the
learned city. But it was probably as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced
but two centuries before Christ,[6] it had not had time to form forests;
to become, as it now is, the characteristic tree of the lower Apennines,
supplanting its ancient but thriftless relative the beech, and driving
the latter back to the narrow domain which it still occupies on the top
of Monte Sant’ Angelo. The gnarled and twisted chestnut trunks, with
their pointed foliage, under which Salvator Rosa studied his art when
sojourning among the brigands at the back of Amalfi, have no counterpart
in the drawings of Pompeii any more than in the poetry of Virgil.
Of cultivated crops, wheat and barley are represented in the Pompeian
frescoes, and grains of them have been discovered in the houses. In one
pretty sketch a quail is picking at an ear of barley; in another at a
kind of millet. Other less known cereals seem to have been familiar to
the ancients. But two of the most important, both in an economic and
picturesque point of view, are missing from these sketches,—maize and
rice. Both are of modern introduction. The “polenta” of the classical
peasant was of barley. Cotton, it need scarcely be added, is of very
modern introduction; it now covers extensive fields at the southern foot
of Vesuvius.
After this long list of acquisitions, we must turn to some few instances
of vegetable forms familiar to the ancient eye, and which the modern
misses. The absolute extinction of a species is indeed a rare thing.
Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’ likens the changes in
vegetation to those which take place in a language: the appearance of a
new word, or a new species, attracts observation at once; the
disappearance of an old one is very gradual, and seldom total. We have
already spoken of the comparative scarcity at present of deciduous
trees, and of one—the æsculus—which modern botanists have been unable to
define. But one or two ornamental foreigners, introduced in old times,
have also disappeared, or nearly so. The most remarkable of these is the
oriental Plane. Every Latin scholar is well aware of the modish passion
for these trees which prevailed among the wealthy Romans, a preference
not wholly æsthetic; it was partly a fashion, borrowed like other
fashions from the despotic East, in days when republican millionaires at
Rome, like those of Washington, had begun to discover that everything
really meritorious came from lands possessing a “strong government.” The
Platanus had been from hoary antiquity the object of veneration of
Persian monarchs and Grecian heroes. No tree had anything like the same
amount of historic and fabulous tradition attached to it. Marsyas was
hanged on one, when duly skinned, by Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus
planted a couple, each of which, a monstrous relic, was shown to
Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes had caused his whole host to halt
before a noble specimen in Lycia. “He was so enamoured of it,” says old
Evelyn, “that for some days neither the concernment of his expedition,
nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army,
could persuade him from it. He styled it his mistress, his minion, his
goddess: and when he was forced to part from it, he caused a picture of
it to be stamped on a model of gold, which he continually wore about
him.” As it is now the glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it was of the
Greek cities of yore. The groves of the Academe and Lyceum were composed
of it. “By the Plane Tree” was the favourite oath of Socrates: the more
shame to him, said his accuser Melitus, that he should blaspheme so fine
a tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said
to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The
Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm
which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his
sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of
its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in
Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and
flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine.
“Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.”
It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as
well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of
every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions.
“Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.”
Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to
form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the
remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at
Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of
an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be,
of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths
march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of
late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an
ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely,
and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to
throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark.
Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe,
as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost
always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the
princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or
button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger
perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the
encroachments of modern democracy.
To the Oriental plane we must add the date-palm: not indeed as strange
now to the Italian eye, nor as very abundant in classical times; but as
certainly more abundant then than now; an exception to the general law
which we have indicated of the increasing prevalence of Southern forms
of vegetation. The date-palm in Italy is, after all, but an occasional
exotic. Mayer, the painstaking German author of a book on ‘Naples and
the Neapolitans,’ says there are scarcely a dozen or two of them in the
gardens of that city and its suburbs. There are eight or ten only in
Rome, says M. Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit. It dwells
uncomfortably, in the uncongenial neighbourhood of the pine; for in
America and other unsophisticated regions, the natural limit of the palm
ends where that of the pine begins. Picturesque as its solitary form
often is, in the villa garden, or behind the convent wall, we cannot
look at it without thinking of some poor captive Saracen maiden,
shivering at the door of a Northern crusading baron. Even on the coast
of the Riviera, where it appears to thrive the most, it affords a
melancholy sight when writhing under the icy Mistral, which ever and
anon turns the flank of the precarious barrier of the Maritime Alps, and
whirls its blasts of snow-dust against the broad leaves. It appears in
many of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw suggests that this does not prove
it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But
the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore
in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.[7] “Vulgo in
Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from
the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of
Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it
in the ‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’ is still more to the point,
when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds,
among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for
making cordage.
“Thus we perceive,” concludes our naturalist, “that the vegetable world,
and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many
changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the
ancient Pompeians enjoyed a great superiority over the moderns in
respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the
arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased
geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their
descendants.”
But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these
relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects
perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and
return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples
of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose
speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such
inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they
inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and
from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the
ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out
of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though
profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’
in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present
catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as
brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark _forward_ and
abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming
degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was
about to fall.
“In peggio
Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida
Ai putridi nipoti
L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema
De’ miseri vendetta.”
For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are
sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection;
but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from
with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse
ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the
last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian
cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region
in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was
the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of
intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can
scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality.
“Credetne virûm ventura propago,
Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt,
Infra urbes populosque premi.”
And yet there are those who persist in cramming us with that dry formula
of Positivism, that each generation enjoys the “accumulated knowledge”
of preceding ones! Ask those countless millions of Chinese who vegetate,
generation after generation, in the vast interior of their empire apart
from all foreign influence, how much of “accumulated knowledge” their
community has gathered since the days of Confucius; ask the black
nations of the interior of Africa what amount of “progress”
distinguishes them from their ancestors known to Herodotus or to Leo
Africanus; ask the wretched remnants of tribes which wander over the
American wilderness, whether their progenitors, the sons of those who
came thither over the ocean, were fewer and feebler and more ignorant
than they? For those who seek truth and not phrases, “progress,” as the
term is used in social science, is an attribute not of mankind, but of
the European family alone; and of that family only since the discovery
of printing. What that incomparably greatest of all merely human events
may have done towards fixing the elements of social improvement, and
converting into a permanent advance that which was before only a
precarious, oscillatory movement, we need not now consider. It may be
that the so-called triumphal march of humanity is now secured from
repulse, and that, as some of our latest speculators seem to hold, the
powers of nature which we employ will begin of themselves to decay
before our capability of employing them abates. But all this, if so,
does not annul the melancholy record of previous periods of loss and
retreat. It is extremely difficult, no doubt, for us to realise those
periods. In our healthy exuberance of life we can hardly conceive a
state of chronic political ebb or decline—a state, that is, in which
each generation, instead of profiting by the “accumulated knowledge” of
its predecessors, lets something of the results of that knowledge drop
from its enfeebled grasp; is reduced in numbers, less provided with the
external comforts of life, weaker against aggression, poorer in
substance, feebler in spirit, inferior in mental acquirements;
nevertheless, such periods have been beyond all doubt. The history of
the Byzantine empire furnishes one well known to all: and many such have
rolled drearily away in the dimmer ages of early time, since the
subjects of Nimrod were dispersed on the plain of Shinar. But let us
take the most familiar, and at the same time the truest, instance of
what we mean, and which happens also to be most germane to the matter in
hand. Could a modern really do what many a visitor to Pompeii has
striven to do in intense eagerness of fancy; could he restore those
truncated columns and repeople those desolate streets, and actually
converse with some cultivated contemporary of Pliny and Juvenal, or
Cicero and Horace; one can fancy that the feeling on both sides, after
the first strangeness of the meeting had been got over, would be one of
surprise, that two specimens of humanity of such distant origin could
have so much in common. In moral and social philosophy; in political
speculation; in appreciation of eloquence, literature, art, they would
really find themselves—some exceptions apart which would give zest to
the conversation—almost on the same ground. In respect of matters of
still more intimate interest—the inner clothing, as it were, of
civilised existence—in their estimate of physical and mental pursuits,
tendencies, weaknesses, pleasures, and pains, and their relation to each
other—each would feel that he understood his companion; each would be
conscious, as it were, of possessing a key to many of the other’s inmost
feelings. This would be partly owing, no doubt, to the circumstance that
the ancients have been our tutors, and that much of our mental furniture
is derived directly from them. But also, in great measure, to mere
similarity of circumstances, which engenders similarity of ideas.
Civilisations so nearly resembling each other, even in many points of
minuteness, as those of modern Europe and of the Rome of Cicero or the
Athens of Demosthenes, must, from the necessity of the case, have
strongly corresponding spiritual and mental emotions, and corresponding
language wherein to express them.
Now let us alter the picture: let the man of the nineteenth century wake
up under the shadow of Winchester or Canterbury Cathedral, such as the
Saxons had reared them, and, to give him the best company of the day,
let him consort with a baron or an abbot of the time of the Norman
conquest. Except the subject of religion, of which we would not now
speak, what single topic could they have in common? Would they not be
separated from each other by a barrier as high and strong as any which
divides contemporary civilised from savage man? What object (except
possibly horses and dogs), could they appreciate together? What points
of morals or science or politics, small talk, sentiment, or humour,
would suit them both? How could they argue on premises which one would
assume as certain and the other would treat with contempt? The medieval
wight would certainly rate the modern at a very different value from his
own estimate of himself; and if the modern escaped with a whole skin
from the interview, which is greatly to be doubted of, he would find his
romantic respect for the baron, or veneration for the ecclesiastic, very
little increased. They would be denizens of alien spheres, and would
converse in utterly dissonant tongues.
And yet the Norman was our countryman; was nearer to us by many an age
than the Roman; and possessed the “accumulated knowledge” (had such a
thing really existed before the invention of printing), of many an
intervening generation. But these were in truth generations of decline,
not of advance; a decline often hardly sensible, or arrested for a time,
but on the whole prodigious. And if the enthusiastic disciple of
progress chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant exceptions to his
general theory of flow, let us remember that a space of a thousand
years, however unimportant to a geologist, is a considerable fraction of
the historical existence of man.
And this, as many have said, though not many truly feel it, is one of
the most real advantages of classical study, and one of the charms which
make us turn back to it with recurring affection, after resultless
wanderings in company with the “Positivists.” He who has imbibed its
lessons deeply can hardly find his judgment much affected by those
metaphors turned into arguments which pass commonly current, likening
the youth, manhood, and old age of the world to those of an individual;
nor will he readily adopt the formulas of a recent clever writer of the
Positive school, that “we may expect to find, in the history of man,
each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the
preceding,” and that “this power, whereby the present ever gathers into
itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a
colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of
judgment.” Classical study made men pedants, after a fashion, two
centuries ago; at present its effect is to preserve them from an equally
tasteless and less innocent pedantry. By bringing clearly before our
view that magnificent phantasma of great communities entombed, and great
conceptions buried with them, it weakens the ordinary temptation to
overvalue ourselves and our age. It displays to us the vast ocean of
moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of
rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining
ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that
“Excelsior” tendency which elevates but often misleads us—an
indiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species.
AMERICAN STATE PAPERS.[8]
It is not probable that many of our readers will meet with the volumes,
lately published in Washington, containing the correspondence of
American diplomatists during the period of the civil war; but, after
perusing some of the specimens we shall offer, they will no doubt agree
with us in thinking it a pity that these productions should not be
generally known. Under any circumstances, most people would find
something comical in a set of elderly gentlemen, engaged in important
business, exchanging by letter moral sentiments suited to a schoolboy’s
theme. But when the compositions thus embellished are of the kind known
to the world as State Papers, and when the writers, who thus aim, like
the interlocutors in a religious novel, at the instruction of the
universe through the medium of dialogue, are American politicians, the
effect produced is such as few professed humorists could hope to rival.
For most people are aware nowadays that the atmosphere through which
those politicians must pass before they can attain to that eminence, one
condition of which is the writing of state papers, is much more likely
to develop in them the wisdom of the serpent than the guilelessness of
the dove. Remembering the pushing and scrambling, the elbowing of vile
competitors, the truckling and corruption, the wire-pulling and
log-rolling, the acquaintance with all the small and dirty ramifications
of tickets and platforms, which success in politics demands in the
States, the very last vein of composition we should expect to find these
gentlemen especially cultivating would be that in which the sage Imlac
addresses Rasselas, or in which the good godmother improves every
occasion in a children’s story. A difficulty to believe in the existence
of craft or guile or self-interest as motives of political conduct,
yielding at last to a surprised and mournful conviction of the sad
truth, and a touching and simple style of moralising over human
delinquency, are the characteristics, on paper, of the diplomatists who
have particularly distinguished themselves in the pleasing and pastoral
pursuits we have attempted to enumerate. Everybody who has read American
speeches must have noticed in them a tendency to flowery sentiment and
to ancient and fish-like metaphors, such as the audiences of the Old
World would reject. Why the not very immaculate or poetical classes who
constitute a New York mob should especially relish this style of
oratory, we cannot explain; but it is the fact that it seems to succeed
in America whether the audience be a constituency, or a house of
assembly, or the population of a Boston lecture-room, or the
entertainers of an American celebrity, or a jury in a criminal case—and
all the scribes of their newspapers indulge in the same vein. That it
does succeed may appear to be a sufficiently good reason why the
parliamentary and stump orators of America should habitually launch at
their audiences such sentences as are, on this side of the water, never
addressed to any but the galleries at a Surrey melodrama. But directly
the speakers are placed in relation to foreign Governments, they think
it necessary to engraft on the florid Rosa-Matilda style which deals
with “star-spangled banners,” “great, glorious, and free people,” and
“the best Government the world ever saw,” the virtuous didactic style we
have attempted to describe, and which we suppose they imagine to be
particularly likely to influence the counsels of such guileless and
simple-minded statesmen as Gortchakoff, Rechberg, Russell, Palmerston,
and the Emperor Napoleon.
The principal agent in the pious attempt to inoculate mankind, through
their Governments, with virtuous principles, is Mr William Henry Seward.
The circumstances under which the benevolent sage perseveres in his
philanthropic efforts are not such as are favourable to placid
meditation or composition. His lucubrations must have been disturbed not
unfrequently by the booming of Confederate cannon. The sudden irruption
on his privacy of a distracted Finance Minister, a desperate War
Secretary, or a bewildered President, must have been extremely
unfavourable to the prosecution of the task. Yet that he struggled
successfully with those hostile influences is proved by the enormous
volume of his essays, which must, we estimate, be equal in bulk, for one
year, to about four volumes of the original edition of ‘The
Rambler’—under which title, indeed, they might not inappropriately have
been published. Seated at his desk, with the copybooks of his boyhood at
hand for quotation, in a glow of philanthropy that cannot fail to warm
what he would himself call the “moral atmosphere” of barbaric Europe, he
can shut his eyes to passing events, and find sermons in civil wars, and
good in everything. Immediately on his accession to office, he begins a
circular to all the Ministers at foreign courts in the following style:
“Sir,—The advocates of benevolence, and the believers in human progress,
encouraged by the slow though marked meliorations of the barbarities of
war which have obtained in modern times, have been, as you are well
aware, recently engaged,” &c.
Since that was written, the advocates of benevolence and the believers
in human progress have been further encouraged by the “meliorations” of
stone fleets, of corps of licensed plunderers, of the submersion of
great tracts of cultivated land, of the devastation of half a State, of
the incitement to servile insurrection, and of the rule of Benjamin F.
Butler at New Orleans—illustrations of his remark, which the eminent
essayist probably did not at that time expect.
In the early part of his correspondence, Mr Seward’s opinions of the
policy to be pursued towards the South are much more indulgent than at a
later period. “The Union,” he says, on March 22, 1861, “was formed upon
popular consent, and must always practically stand on the same basis.”
He says, on April 10, that Secession is “a bad enterprise,” and that the
Secessionists are “a misguided portion of our fellow-citizens.” But he
goes on to say that the President “would not be disposed to reject a
cardinal dogma of theirs (the citizens of the Southern States), namely,
that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to
obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that
proposition. _But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true.
Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly
disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State._ This Federal
republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one
which is most unfitted for such a labour.” And he goes on to suggest the
following paternal method of bringing back the prodigal South, and
providing a fatted calf for it:—
“The system has within itself adequate peaceful, conservative, and
recuperative forces. Firmness on the part of the Government in
maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and
in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging
war, combined with such measures of justice, moderation, and
forbearance as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to
secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with
the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of
faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the
family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it
undeniably is their most natural, home. The constitution of the United
States provides for that return by authorising Congress, on
application to be made by a certain majority of the States, to
assemble a national convention, in which the organic law can, if it be
needful, be revised so as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion,
so suitable to the habits of the people, and so eminently conducive to
the common safety and welfare.”
These be brave words and high sentiments; but their value as an
expression of conciliatory policy is a little diminished by the fact
that, as the seceding States were then seven out of thirty-four, the
concession spoken of, being dependent on the “application to be made by
a certain majority of the States” (two-thirds), was an impossibility.
And in fact one of the best arguments in favour of Secession is, that
the constitution provides no means whereby a minority, or indeed
anything but a large majority, of States can obtain a remedy for their
grievances, should the interests of the remainder render them adverse.
On the 19th of June, however, a change has come over the spirit of the
Secretary’s dream, leading him to retract even this visionary
compromise.
“What is now seen in this country,” he tells Mr Adams, “is the
occurrence, by no means peculiar, but frequent in all countries, more
frequent even in Great Britain than here, of an armed insurrection
engaged in attempting to overthrow the regularly constituted and
established Government. _There is, of course, the employment of force
by the Government to suppress the insurrection_, as every other
Government necessarily employs force in such cases. But these
incidents by no means constitute a state of war impairing the
sovereignty of the Government, creating belligerent sections, and
entitling foreign States to intervene or to act as neutrals between
them, or in any other way to cast off their lawful obligations to the
nation thus for the moment disturbed. Any other principle than this
would be to resolve government everywhere into a thing of accident and
caprice, and ultimately all human society into a state of perpetual
war.”
Here the facts of the Union, founded on consent, and of the President’s
acceptance of the dogma, together with the unfitness of the Federal
system for the task of subjugation—a task proper to imperial or despotic
governments—are suddenly lost sight of along with the benevolent scheme
for calling on the misguided citizens to abandon their “bad enterprise,”
and return within the fold of the Union; and this great, glorious, and
free Government is driven to confess that its only alternative is the
rude and barbarous one hitherto repudiated, of force, such as the most
abject monarchy might adopt. To such complexion must even the most
beneficent institutions come under the pressure of necessity. And this
change of Mr Seward’s tone is contemporaneous with his observation of
the sudden appearance of inflexible and enthusiastic resolve on the part
of the people of the North to put down the Secession by military power.
At this time two objects are diligently prosecuted by the high-minded
Seward, always on the highest grounds. The one is the task of convincing
the British Government that it has fallen into a grave error in
acknowledging the South as a belligerent, and warning it against
receiving the “missionaries of the insurgents,” as he terms the
commissioners of the Southern Confederacy. “The cause of the North,” he
says, “involves the independence of nations and the right of human
nature.” “We feel free to assume that it is the general conviction of
men, not only here, but in all other countries, that this Federal Union
affords a better system than any other that could be contrived to assure
the safety, the peace, the prosperity, the welfare, and the happiness of
all the States of which it is composed.” “It is a war,” he says
elsewhere, “against human nature;” and again, “The wit of man fails to
suggest, not merely a better political system, having the same objects
as the present Union, but even any possible substitute for it.” And on
the 21st July, “I cannot leave the subject without endeavouring once
more, as I have so often done before, to induce the British Government
to realise the conviction which I have more than once expressed in this
correspondence, that the policy of the Government is one that is based
on interests of the greatest importance and sentiments of the highest
virtue, and therefore is in no case likely to be changed, whatever may
be the varying fortunes of the war at home, or the action of foreign
nations on this subject, while the policy of foreign States rests on
ephemeral interests of commerce or ambition.” “Sure we are that the
transaction now going on in our country involves the progress of
civilisation and humanity, and equally sure that our attitude in it is
right, and no less sure that our press and our statesmen are equal in
ability and influence to any in Europe.”
Manifestly, to countenance any power hostile to so beneficent a system
would be almost as bad as to acknowledge Satan and the rebel angels as
belligerents. But lest “the cupidity and caprice of Great Britain,” to
which, he says, the disunionists will appeal, should render her blind to
such high considerations, he takes a lower ground with her, and
delivers, May 21, 1861, the following ominous and prophetic warning:—
“Great Britain has but to wait _a few months_, and all her present
inconveniences will cease with our own troubles. If she take a
different course, she will calculate for herself the ultimate as well
as the immediate consequences, and will consider what position she
will hold when she shall have for ever lost the sympathies and
affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she
has a natural claim.”
It is a sad picture thus presented to us of the British Pythias
abandoned by the American Damon, and left alone and friendless in the
world. Yet with that direful consequence we are threatened unless we
accept the idea of neutrality entertained in common by Mr Seward and Mr
Bright, who regard it not as a “cold and unfriendly,” but as a highly
enthusiastic, condition.
But, as we said, this was not the only point to which the high-minded
Secretary at this period directed his efforts. At the Congress of Paris
in 1856 the maritime Powers of Europe had come to an agreement in order
to mitigate the severities of war, by which, among other stipulations,
privateering was abolished so far as the parties to the compact were
concerned. In this agreement America had refused to join, unless an
article, specially favourable to herself, should be introduced. But the
flame of philanthropy which glowed so ardently in Mr Seward’s breast,
now lit up the question which had been buried in obscurity since 1857,
and he proposed, of course from the most elevated motives, that America
should now join the convention. As provision had originally been made
for the admission of parties wishing subsequently to accede to it, no
difficulty appeared, and everything seemed to work smoothly—Ministers
arranging and conceding, conventions made ready for signature, and all
going merry as a marriage-bell.
But it had occurred to the suspicious mind of Lord Russell, whose
political morals had been debauched by long diplomatic intercourse with
the barbaric Cabinets of Europe, and who was incredulous of public
virtue even in the immaculate statesmen of America, that a great
advantage would accrue to the Northern Government by joining in the
Declaration at this juncture, because the abolition of privateering
would exclude the South from all the ports of Europe, which would of
course still be open to the regular navy of the North. Not that the
proposals of Mr Seward were likely to inspire the suspicion; for, taking
the lofty grounds of benefit to the human race, his papers on the
subject contained but two slight incidental allusions to the minor
point. The Provisional Government of the Confederates had, he said,
“taken the bad resolution to invite privateers to prey upon the peaceful
commerce of the United States.” And on the 21st May he says to Mr Adams,
“You already have our authority to propose to her our accession to that
Declaration. If she refuse it, it can only be because she is willing to
become the patron of privateering when aimed at our devastation.” These
are the only hints on the subject given to the American Ministers.
Towards foreign Governments the elevated tone of public virtue was never
for a moment jarred by the discordant note of immediate advantage.
But the crafty Russell, led by the low cunning of the European
diplomatic mind, had, while appearing to accede with perfect frankness
to the American proposal, made this seemingly casual remark, “I need
scarcely add that, on the part of Great Britain, the engagement will be
prospective, and will not invalidate anything already done”—meaning, of
course, We shall be happy to receive your adhesion to the compact, but
the prohibition of privateering must not apply to the Confederates, whom
we have already acknowledged as belligerents.
The manner in which the virtuous statesmen of the Republic viewed this
passage or “implied reservation” was highly characteristic. Incapable of
guile themselves, they could not suspect that they could be the objects
of suspicion. It was impossible to say what might be hidden behind the
mysterious words. Mr Seward professed himself totally in the dark, and
demanded explanation. Whereupon Lord John declares “that her Majesty
does not intend thereby to undertake any engagement which shall have any
bearing, direct or indirect, on the internal differences now prevailing
in the United States.”
If the high-minded Secretary was startled by the original passage, he
was deeply wounded by the explanation. To suppose that the American
Government were aiming at any petty advantage over the Confederates in
the matter was a point beneath notice. The Minister appointed to
conclude the convention says, indeed—
“The natural effect of such an accompaniment would seem to be to imply
that the Government of the United States might be desirous at this
time to take a part in the Declaration, not from any high purpose or
durable policy, but with the view of securing some small temporary
object in the unhappy struggle which is going on at home. Such an
inference would spoil all the value that might be attached to the act
itself.”
It might be supposed that the best way to restore the full value to the
act would have been to reject the petty despised advantage by accepting
the convention with the reservation. But so deeply have the virtuous
statesmen been wounded by the unworthy suspicion, that they have no
heart to proceed in the business. They have done their best for
humanity, and failed. The reservation was so unusual, so informal, and
it so complicated the matter, that the negotiation must be suspended,
said the American Secretary—hoping, however, with habitual pathos, that
it might be resumed “in some happier time.”
Britannia having thus, by the refusal of the American Government to
proceed with the negotiation, clearly constituted herself the patron of
privateering, and having also declined to accept Mr Seward’s
interpretation of neutrality, must henceforth expect him to regard her
as a Puritan conscious of being in a state of grace would regard some
wretched backslider still in the bonds of iniquity. But in the midst of
his homilies an event had occurred which had forced from him a very
natural expression of alarm, the effect of which in the state papers is
very much as if Mr Spurgeon, in the delivery of an eloquent sermon,
should howl with anguish on feeling a sharp twinge of the gout. Mr
Seward’s howl being a short one, we give it entire:—
“[_Confidential._]
DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
WASHINGTON, _July 26, 1861_.
“SIR,—My despatch, No. 42, dated July 21, was delayed beyond the
proper mail-day by circumstances entirely beyond my control. I trust,
however, that it will still be in time.
“Our army of the Potomac on Sunday last met a reverse equally severe
and unexpected. For a day or two the panic which had produced the
result was followed by a panic that seemed to threaten to demoralise
the country. But that evil has ceased already. The result is already
seen in a vigorous reconstruction upon a scale of greater magnitude
and increased enthusiasm.
“It is not likely that anything will now be done here hastily or
inconsiderately affecting our foreign relations.
“I am, sir, respectfully, your obedient servant,
WILLIAM H. SEWARD.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Esq.,
&c. &c. &c.”
An interval of three days sufficed, however, in a considerable degree,
to restore the elastic spirits of the buoyant Secretary, for on 29th
July he says:—
“You will hear of a reverse of our arms in Virginia. The exaggerations
of the result have been as great as the public impatience, perhaps,
which brought it about. But the affair will not produce any serious
injury. The strength of the insurrection is not broken, but it is not
formidable. The vigour of the Government will be increased, and the
ultimate result will be a triumph of the Constitution. Do not be
misled by panic reports of danger apprehended for the capital.”
And on the 12th August Seward’s himself again,—
“The shock produced by the reverse of our arms at Bull Run has passed
away. The army is reorganised; the elections show that reaction
against disunion has begun in the revolutionary States, and we may
confidently look for a restoration of the national authority
throughout the Union. If our foreign relations were once promptly
reestablished on their former basis, the disunion sentiment would
languish and perish within a year.”
In this way, after each defeat, or “reverse of our arms,” he presently
consoles himself by extracting a precious jewel, in the shape of a
moral, from the front of adversity, and transmitting it for the comfort
of the American envoys. We all remember the achievement which first made
Jackson famous, of turning suddenly on Banks at Winchester and driving
him headlong over the Potomac, previous to joining in the general
movement against M‘Clellan on the Chickahominy. Upon that event Mr
Seward remarks to Mr Adams:—
“The defeat of General Banks at Winchester yesterday, and his
withdrawal across the Potomac, are just now the prominent incidents of
the war. A careful consideration of the affair results in the
satisfactory conclusion that the movement of the enemy _was one of
merely energetic strategy_.”
What this can possibly mean, or why it should be satisfactory to Mr
Seward, or what satisfaction it could convey to Mr Adams, we are utterly
at a loss to divine. Again, on July 7th, when M‘Clellan had been driven
from the York to the James River, he tells Mr Adams that—
“The efficiency of the army of the Union is improved.... If the
representative parties had now to choose whether they would have the
national army where it is and as it is, or back again where it was and
as it was, it is not to be doubted that the insurgents would prefer to
it the position and condition on the Pamunkey, and the friends of the
Union the one now attained on the banks of the James.... The
insurgents and the world abroad will see that the virtue of the people
is adequate to the responsibilities which Providence has cast upon
them.”
July 12th, he states the cheering fact that a force is “under the
command of Major-General Pope, who has achieved great successes in the
Western States, and is esteemed an officer of great ability.”
July 28th, he says: “Our assault upon Richmond is for the moment
suspended. No great and striking movements or achievements are
occurring, and the Government is rather preparing its energies for
renewed operations than continuing to surprise the world with new and
brilliant victories.” Thus much in the way of particular information,
but the moral presently follows:—
“It is not upon isolated events, much less upon transitory popular
impulses, that Governments are expected to build their policies in
regard to foreign countries. What I think is important, not less for
foreign nations than for ourselves, is always to hold our civil war
under contemplation, not merely as streams of unequal widths and
intermitting currents, but as one continuous river, and so not to
forget its source, its direction, and not only its immediate and
local, but also its ultimate and universal, effects.”
And before the reader can recover from this tremendous passage, it is
followed up by another:—
“It is only the reflecting observer who habitually considers the
course of events occurring in any one country as being determined, or
at least materially influenced, by natural causes lying wholly or in
part outside of that country, and which create a force commonly
recognised under various names as the opinion of mankind, or the
spirit or the genius of the age or of the times.”
After uttering this extraordinary sentence, one might expect the oracle
to become exhausted; but not at all: it continues to pour forth pages of
reasoning equally close and clear on this same 28th July. And what do
our readers think of this splendid passage, written April 14th?—
“It is believed that this survey of the military position of the
Government may serve to satisfy Great Britain that those statesmen
here and abroad who, a year ago, mistook a political syncope for
national death and dissolution, altogether misunderstood the
resources, the character, and the energies of the American Union. The
blood that at first retreated to the heart, is now coursing healthily
through all the veins and arteries of the whole system; and what
seemed at first to be a hopeless paralysis, was in fact but the
beginning of an organic change to more robust and vigorous health than
the nation has ever before enjoyed.”
And when M‘Clellan finally abandoned the peninsula with the wreck of his
army, it is announced to Mr Adams, and to Mr Dayton, the Minister to
France, in this way:—
“General Halleck, upon taking command of the army, made a careful
survey of the entire military position, and concluded thereupon to
withdraw the army of the Potomac from the peninsula, and to combine
all our forces in front of Richmond. It is believed to have been
substantially accomplished without any casualty. Our new levies are
coming in in great numbers and in fine spirits. The gloom has passed
away from the public mind. Although our arrangements for resuming
offensive operations are yet incomplete, we have much confidence in
being able to do so speedily and with decisive effect.... It is
represented to us that the popular determination to maintain the Union
has at no time been as unanimous and as earnest as it is now.”
And so on of all events, whether promising success or ending in
disaster; the object being to persuade foreign Governments what a
mistake they made in countenancing such a failing business as Secession.
And when the prospect is especially cheerful—when patriots under arms
are counted by hundreds of thousands, and when any successes call for a
fresh enumeration of the triumphs of the Republic—a judicious menace is
insinuated in the despatch, by hinting that as soon as the rebellion is
crushed (which it is always just going to be) the shortcomings of those
whose duty it was to assist the Union in its “hour of distress,” will
not be forgotten by the victorious and thrice-potent Northern people.
For instance, on January 31 he says:—
“I have observed that the British people were satisfied with the
vigour and the energy of the preparations which their Government made
for the war which they expected to occur between them and ourselves.
_It may be profitable for us all to reflect_ that the military and
naval preparations which have been made by this Government to put down
the insurrection have, every day since the 1st of May last, equalled,
if not surpassed, the daily proportion of those war-preparations which
were regarded as so demonstrative in Great Britain.”
And again, 2d June 1862:—
“The President thinks it desirable that the Government of Great
Britain should consider, before the war closes, what are likely to be
the sentiments of the two nations in regard to each other after that
event shall have occurred.”
We wonder whether it ever occurred to Mr Seward that if the imaginary
injuries of one nation upon another are to be visited with such remote
vindictiveness, it may be probable that very real and deep sufferings
may leave still more indelible rancour behind them; and that there is a
people at this moment not only undergoing treatment at the hands of the
Union which excites the horror of civilised nations, but proving itself
perfectly capable of executing future vengeance.
But in providing for the probability that Great Britain will be
indifferent to the high moral ground which he indicates for giving her
sympathies to the Union, Mr Seward does not trust entirely to threats. A
lower argument, better suited to her defective moral sense, consists in
pointing out that it is the interest of European countries to see the
war terminate as quickly as possible; that it is also the interest of
the Union to terminate the war as quickly as possible: _ergo_, the way
to attain the common object is to unite in procuring it. But he omits to
show why the same argument might not apply with equal force to an
alliance with the South.
All this eloquence and logic has a double object—first, to avert the
recognition of the South, followed by subsequent intervention; and,
secondly, and chiefly, to induce the European Powers to retrace the step
they had taken of acknowledging the South as a belligerent. The original
protest against this step had been on the particular ground that the
Government had taken it more hastily than was needful, and ought to have
awaited the arrival of Mr Adams, charged with the reasons which the
Federal Government might urge in protesting against it. As the measure
was one of neutrality, it was manifestly proper that it should be
adopted without hearing the arguments of one side only. However, the
North considered itself injured, and expressed its sense of injury; but
until we read these papers we had thought that the precipitation of the
measure was the chief ground on which it was complained of. But so far
from that being the case, the measure itself constitutes, down to the
present time, the chief point of dispute. It is not going too far to say
that, had the Federal Government accepted the position of neutrality of
foreign Governments, and conducted its relations with them on that
basis, the greater part of these despatches need never have been
written. Nine-tenths of them are the result of looking at the same facts
from two points of view—of looking at the war, on the one side, as a
conflict between great sections, each possessed of power sufficient to
maintain itself against the other, and to produce consequences highly
important to neutrals; on the other side, as a domestic difficulty
caused by a weak and failing faction, and which should not be noticed by
foreign Powers any more than any other insignificant outbreak. Our
Government saw in it the division of the Republic into portions,
strongly defined by a territorial line, arming themselves for a conflict
in which the balance of right was a subtle question open to opposite
interpretations, but in which, it was evident, the Federal Government
could never be victorious consistently with its own principles. The
magnitude of the quarrel was such as powerfully to affect our own
interests, and to render the probability imminent that the Queen’s
subjects would be involved in the struggle, on the one side or the
other, in such a manner as to compromise themselves, perhaps the
Government. That the nature of the war was rightly estimated, events
have more than sufficiently proved; that it was the first duty of the
Government to protect its own subjects will probably be admitted by most
moralists. But there is one moralist, Mr Seward, who thinks that the
British Government, however bound to protect the interests of its own
subjects, as it might be, he admits, in an inferior degree, is still
more bound to consider the interests of the human race as involved in
the maintenance of the Federal Union,—of the system, be it remembered,
whose inevitable results have been to make a Lincoln the chief
magistrate, and a Seward the chief minister—a system which has for years
been the most corrupt ever known, and the inability of which to produce
any kind of political merit is one of the wonders of the world.
Mr Seward’s view, which he insists that foreign Governments should
adopt, is that they must not admit the existence of any war at all; that
Bull’s Run and Fredericksburg, and all the disasters of M‘Clellan and
Pope, are the work of a small insurrectionary faction; that the
inability of the Federalists to recover authority in the South does not
at all affect the integrity of the Republic; and that the millions of
men whom he so complacently describes as determined to restore the Union
have been called to arms to quell a few “misguided fellow-citizens” who
have taken the “bad resolution” of seceding from its authority. But
neither great defeats, nor vast armaments, nor huge debt, nor impending
dissolution, can divert Mr. Seward from his singular efforts to persuade
foreign Governments, chiefly ours, to adopt his extraordinary fiction as
their rule of action. If mere acquiescence in his view were all that he
demanded, it might be no great matter; but he requires that we shall not
merely admit the fictitious view, but proceed to found thereon the
extraordinary measures which we shall presently find indicated in his
correspondence. What the view itself is may be gathered from a few
extracts.
19th June 1861:—
“The United States are still solely and exclusively sovereign within
the territories they have lawfully acquired and long possessed, as
they have always been.... Great Britain, by virtue of these relations,
is a stranger to parties and sections in this country, whether they
are loyal to the United States or not; and Great Britain can neither
rightfully qualify the sovereignty of the United States, nor concede
nor recognise any rights or interests or power of any party, State, or
section, in contravention to the unbroken sovereignty of the Federal
Union.”
6th March 1862:—
“If Great Britain should revoke her decree conceding belligerent
rights to the insurgents to-day, this civil strife, which is the cause
of all the derangement of those relations, and the only cause of all
apprehended dangers of that kind, would end to-morrow. The United
States have continually insisted that the disturbers of their peace
are mere insurgents, not lawful belligerents. This Government neither
can nor is likely to have occasion to change this position; but her
Majesty can, and it would seem that she must, sooner or later desire
to relinquish her position. It was a position taken in haste, and in
anticipation of the probable success of the revolution. The failure of
that revolution is sufficiently apparent. Why should not the position
be relinquished, and the peace of our country thus be allowed to be
restored?”
10th March 1862:—
“Let the Governments of Great Britain and France rescind the decrees
which concede belligerent rights to a dwindling faction in this
country, and all their troubles will come to a speedy end.”
15th March 1862:—
... “We are brought to lament anew the precipitancy with which foreign
Powers so unnecessarily conceded to the insurrection belligerent
rights. The President trusts that you are sparing no efforts to
convince Earl Russell that the time has come when that concession can
be revoked with safety to Great Britain and advantage to the great
material interests of that country.”
To which Mr Adams responds, 27th March:—
“I am bound to notice in several of your late despatches a strong
disposition to press upon the British Government an argument for a
retraction of its original error in granting to the rebels the rights
of a belligerent. There may come a moment when such a proceeding might
seem to me likely to be of use. But I must frankly confess that I do
not see it yet.”
We will now show by a few other extracts what consequences Mr Seward
expected to follow the adoption of his view.
6th March 1862—Mr Seward to Mr Adams:—
“Is it not worth your pains to suggest to him the inquiry whether it
would not be wiser and better _to remove the necessity for our
blockade_ than to keep the two nations, and even the whole world, in
debate about the rightfulness or the expediency of attempting to break
it, with all the consequences of so hostile a measure?”
2d April:—
“It is a matter of deep regret to us that our troubles at home render
it hazardous to withdraw a part of our great land and naval forces
from operating here, and send them to China to co-operate with the
forces of the Allies there. As you are well aware, the continuance of
the insurrection in the United States is due to the attitudes of Great
Britain and France towards our country. It would seem to be desirable
for those two States to have our co-operation in China in preserving a
commerce of vast importance to them as well as to ourselves. _That
co-operation we could give if we were relieved from the necessity for
maintaining a blockade and siege of our southern ports._”
Whether Mr Seward desired that Great Britain should herself undertake
the blockade of the Southern ports, or should pass a law, and persuade
other States to pass similar laws, prohibiting all commercial
intercourse with the South, and should enforce the prohibition, does not
appear. But that he desired one of these measures to be adopted is
clear, and the one would not be more extraordinary than the other.
Another operation of the adoption of Mr Seward’s fiction is seen in the
case of the British Consul at Charleston. The British and French
Governments agreed that it was expedient to communicate to the persons
exercising authority in the Confederate States the desire of those
Governments that certain articles of the Declaration of Paris should be
observed by them in the prosecution of hostilities. Mr Seward remarks
thereupon—
“It is enough to say that in our view the proper agents of the British
Government to make known its interest here, are the diplomatic, not
the consular agents of her Majesty; and that the only authority in
this country to which any diplomatic communication whatever can be
made is the Government of the United States itself.”
The articles to which France and England desired to call attention were
those which relate to the capture of the property of neutrals at sea. It
was very necessary to the protection of our commerce that they should be
made known, and to do so was not in any way contrary to any of the
pretensions of the Federal Government. Yet because the Powers had chosen
the English Consul as their medium, instead of the Federal authorities,
who did not acknowledge or maintain communications with the Southern
Government, the Consul’s exequatur was withdrawn.
The case of the Trent is too well known, and that of the Alabama is too
recent, to need recapitulation here. It is only necessary to remind the
reader that in the late debate in Parliament it was shown that Mr
Seward’s demands could only be complied with by passing a special law,
having for its exclusive object to aid the Federal Government by
stopping vessels, not on evidence, but on suspicion, that they were
intended to become Confederate ships of war. In the case of the Emily St
Pierre he expressly tells us his views. That vessel had been captured in
attempting to run the blockade, and had then been recaptured from the
prize-crew and brought into Liverpool. Whereupon the Federal authorities
demanded that she should be restored to them by the British Government.
Lord Russell replied that “neutral nations are not bound to punish their
subjects for offences committed only against the laws of war as enforced
by belligerents, nor to restore property rescued by their subjects from
foreign captors.” When our Government communicated its decision
declining to restore her, Mr Seward remarked—
“I think it proper to observe at present that the reasons seem to be
limited to a want of power vested in the Government to restore, and do
not bear at all on the justice or legality of the demand. Under such
circumstances this Government has in more than one instance admitted
the claim, _and appealed to legislative authority for the power to
satisfy it_, and it has been promptly conferred and exercised.”
The American Minister was directed to press these demands for an
alteration of the law. In reply, Lord John Russell, after adverting to
the injury sustained by England in the blockade, says:—
“Yet Her Majesty’s Government have never sought to take advantage of
the obvious imperfections of this blockade, in order to declare it
ineffective. They have, to the loss and detriment of the British
nation, scrupulously observed the duties of Great Britain towards a
friendly State. But when Her Majesty’s Government are asked to go
beyond this, and to overstep the existing powers given them by
municipal and international law, for the purpose of imposing arbitrary
restrictions on the trade of Her Majesty’s subjects, it is impossible
to listen to such suggestions.... If, therefore, the United States
consider it for their interest to inflict this great injury on other
nations, the utmost they can expect is that European Powers shall
respect those acts of the United States which are within the limits of
the law. The United States Government cannot expect that Great Britain
should frame new statutes to aid the Federal blockade, and to carry
into effect the restrictions on commerce which the United States for
their own purposes have thought fit to institute, and the application
of which it is their duty to confine within the legitimate limits of
international law.”
Mr Seward’s demand, that we should adopt his interpretation of the
character of the war, would entail the consequences that we should
ourselves enforce the Federal blockade; that we should refuse all
Southern vessels admission to our ports, while allowing the freest use
of them to the Federal ships; that we should stop all exports of
commodities to the South, while granting fullest commercial intercourse
with the North: and that we should alter our own laws for the purpose of
making ourselves the agents of the belligerent interests of the Federal
Government. His interpretation of neutrality in affording supplies to
the belligerents is amusingly, though we daresay quite unintentionally,
illustrated by himself in a couple of sentences. It will be recollected
that, at the time of the Trent affair, Federal agents had bought up a
great quantity of saltpetre here, and that, in expectation that this
might be used against ourselves in case of war, the export of the
article was prohibited by an Order in Council. This prohibition was
withdrawn when the settlement of the Trent affair removed the
apprehension of war. “It affords me pleasure,” says Mr Seward thereupon,
“to know that the inhibition of saltpetre, which was so unnecessary, has
been rescinded.”
“It has been only European sympathies and European aid,” he proceeds in
the next sentence, “that have enabled our disloyal citizens to prolong
the civil war.” The coupling of his pleasure at getting munitions of war
from England with his complaint against European aid to the South, is
too impudent not to be, we hope, accidental.
Now, does any foreign European statesman living think that it would be a
light task to persuade England to restrain the liberty of her subjects,
or to change her laws? Would any such statesman think that he was
labouring for a practicable object, if he were to found his efforts on
the assumption that such changes would be made at his suggestion? Would
any European people, of whose Government he should be the agent, regard
such efforts with other feelings than derision? Yet there are ministers
of potent Governments who could show plausible reasons for expecting
that their efforts might prevail, and who could urge their arguments
with skill and eloquence. But even if, confident in their long
experience and profound knowledge of diplomacy, they might venture on
the experiment, is it possible to suppose that, when the failure should
be manifest, they would, instead of abandoning the ground for surer
footing, continue to build an entire policy on the shadowy foundation,
though certain to see the baseless fabric sink as often as it should be
raised? Yet such is the hopeless task in which the American Secretary
persists with dreary pertinacity. Some malign spell seems to rule his
course like that by which Michael Scott compelled the devil to make
ropes of sand, and to bale out the sea with a limpet-shell. All his
arguments, all his complaints, all his homilies, are based on the
delusion that he can compel the British Government, by the marvellous
force of his persuasive eloquence, to occupy with him a cloudland of his
own creation; where a resolute people in arms is a dwindling faction;
where a strife that drenches a continent in blood is a waning
insurrection; where the victorious result always seems close, yet is
always receding; where in the obstruction of a commercial system there
is nothing which the partners in that system are entitled to take note
of; where the Union, repelled at all points, and staggering under a load
of debt, is said to exercise authority in all but a few rebellious
spots, and to keep firm hold on the affections of all but a few
misguided men; and where nefarious contracts, armies of mercenaries and
deserters and plundering generals, are bright examples of the virtue and
patriotism of a great people elicited in the hour of trial. All his
instructions, all his remonstrances, all his prophecies, proceed upon
the assumption that these delusions are facts. If it were not so, the
vast volume of despatches would shrink to the size of a pamphlet; for
every dispute, every argument, every feeling of injury, has its root in
the shadowy standing-ground which he chooses to occupy. Of this he
appears sensible himself when he says:—
“I have not failed to see that every wrong this country has been
called to endure at the hands of any foreign Power has been a natural
if not a logical consequence of the first grave error which that Power
committed in conceding to an insurrection, which would otherwise have
been ephemeral, the rights of a public belligerent. It has seemed,
therefore, to be wise, as well as more dignified, to urge the
retrogression upon that false step, rather than to elaborate
complaints of the injuries that have followed it.”
It would have been well had he done so; but instead he has, without
ceasing to urge retrogression, indulged in ceaseless complaints. Wrapt
in his delusions, he drifts calmly on the tide of events that is bearing
him and his despatches to chaos, and takes the crack of doom for a
wholesome thunderstorm which is to clear the political atmosphere.
Nothing can surpass the feeble complacency with which he records his
perpetual illusions as incontrovertible facts. On Feb. 19, 1862, he
writes to Mr Adams:—
“I was just about instructing you how to answer the querulous
complaints in Parliament which you have anticipated, the chief of
which is the assumed incompetency of Government to suppress the
insurrection. But a very shrewd observer, a loyal, and at present
exiled Virginian, fell in at the moment, and expressed to me the
opinion that the end of the war is in sight; that there will be a
short and rapid series of successes over a disheartened conspiracy,
and then all will be over. I give you these opinions as entitling us
to what is sometimes granted by candid tribunals—namely, a suspension
of judgment.”
It is a pity that the name of the shrewd observer has not been
preserved. So sagacious a man ought not to be anonymous.
On the 10th of February he tells us:—
“The process of preparation has steadily gone on in the loyal States,
while that of exhaustion has been going on in the disloyal.... We have
the most satisfactory evidence that the Union will be hailed in every
quarter just as fast as the army shall emancipate the people from the
oppression of the insurgent leaders.”
March 15—“The financial and moral, as well as the physical, elements of
the insurrection seem to be rapidly approaching exhaustion.” On 25th
March it seems impossible to the sanguine Secretary that the
organisation of the insurgents can be longer maintained. On 28th April
he asserts that “to-day the country is assuming that the fate of this
unnatural war is determined by the great event of the capture of New
Orleans.” On the 5th May the fiscal system of the insurgents must, he
calculates, have exploded, and their military connections be everywhere
broken. On 28th May the Federal Government is said to possess the
Mississippi and all the other great natural highways. And on June 2—
“The war in the Mississippi valley may be deemed virtually ended....
The army of General M‘Clellan will be rapidly strengthened, although
it is already deemed adequate to the capture of Richmond.... No
American now indulges any doubt that the integrity of the Union will
be triumphantly maintained.”
24th June:—
“You tell me that in England they still point to the delays at
Richmond and Corinth, and they enlarge upon the absence of displays of
Union feeling in New Orleans and Norfolk. Ah, well! scepticism must be
expected in this world in regard to new political systems, insomuch as
even Divine revelation needs the aid of miracles to make converts to a
new religious faith.”
On 7th July, after M‘Clellan’s disasters, he says:—
“The military situation is clearly intelligible, and ought to be
satisfactory to the cool and candid judgment of the country.... We
have a rumour that Vicksburg is actually taken. But the report is
premature, though we have no doubt but the capture has before this
time occurred.”
And on the 10th November, just before the defeat of Fredericksburg, we
find him “apprehending no insurmountable obstacles to complete success.”
Nor are his prophecies addressed only to England. On the 15th April he
tells Mr Dayton:—
“A few days will probably complete the opening of the Mississippi
river, and restore to the country that national outlet of the great
granary of America which disunion, in its madness, has temporarily
attempted to obstruct, in violation not more of political laws than of
the ordinances of nature.”
22d April:—
“We have reason to expect Savannah to come into our possession within
the next ten days.”
5th May:—
“We shall have peace and union in a very few months, let France and
Great Britain do what they may. We should have them in one month if
either the Emperor or the Queen should speak the word, and say, If the
life of this unnatural insurrection hangs on an expectation of our
favour, let it die. To bring the Emperor to this conviction is your
present urgent duty.”
On the 10th May he has a vision of a Yankee millennium:—
“Less than a year will witness the dissolution of all the armies; the
ironclad navy will rest idly in our ports; taxes will immediately
decrease; and new States will be coming into the Confederacy, bringing
rich contributions to the relief and comfort of mankind.”
On the 10th July he says:—
“The reduction of Vicksburg, the possession of Chattanooga, and the
capture of Richmond, would close the civil war with complete success.
All these three enterprises are going forward. The two former will, we
think, be effected within the next ten days.”
And in September he actually bites his thumb at the Emperor:—
“We have not been misled,” he says, “by any of the semblances of
impartiality or of neutrality which unfriendly proceedings towards us
in a perilous strife have put on. When any Government shall incline to
a new and more unfriendly attitude, we shall then revise with care our
existing relations towards that Power, and shall act in the emergency
as becomes a people who have never yet faltered in their duty to
themselves while they were endeavouring to improve the condition of
the human race.”
Compared with these prophecies the ravings of Mother Shipton become
respectable oracles. Yet on them was founded the entire foreign policy
of the Federal Government; the complaints that foreign statesmen and
other sane persons would not confide in them were incessant; and they
were the lights by which American envoys were expected to steer.
These gentlemen, with more or less sense and discretion, all write in
the stilted creaking style, stuck over with hard metaphors, which
distinguishes the master-spirit Seward, and which appears to be the
characteristic of American public compositions. They seem to have
caught, and to express very honestly, not only his style but his ideas,
and to represent perfectly the querulous, arrogant, exacting tone of the
Secretary. It is not, probably, from a wish to do him homage that they
thus accurately reflect him, but rather because it is natural to
American politicians to take abroad with them that idea of the
pre-eminence of their country which they have passed their lives at home
in asserting, and because their habit of regarding England as the abode
of a jealous aristocracy, and as being always in the wrong, places them
in a position of natural antagonism to us in every case that can arise.
But, granting this to be inevitable, we may consider ourselves very
fortunate that America is represented among us by a gentleman in every
way so entitled to respect as Mr Adams. The son of one President and the
grandson of another, both of whom were elected to the chief place in the
Republic at a time when something else besides obscurity and the absence
of any quality which could excite the jealousy of aspiring men, was
demanded for the attainment of the position which Washington had filled,
the claims of Mr Adams as a public man evidently rest on other grounds
than those of ordinary American politicians. We do not doubt that the
expressions of goodwill and courtesy addressed to him from our Foreign
Office are perfectly sincere and deserved. It is true that the tone of
his correspondence with that office is often captious, and his demands
are sometimes unreasonable. Without prompting from his own Government he
seems often to prejudge questions of international law with a bias that
blinds him to the true bearing of the question, as in the case of the
Emily St Pierre, and leads him to treat as an injury the denial of
concessions which are denied because impossible to be granted. But this
is the traditionary character of American diplomacy: it thus expresses
the spirit of the people, with the promptings of which a Minister may
think himself bound to comply; and both Mr Adams and Mr Dayton, Minister
to France, appear in their correspondence to discharge their duties with
great zeal and fidelity, and, moreover, to display the virtue, not by
any means universal among their brethren, of confining themselves to the
business of their own legations.
We need not say that our remarks relate only to Mr Adams’s share in the
published correspondence, and not to his later acts. The extraordinary
step he took on the 9th April, in granting a permit to an English vessel
enabling her to pass the blockade, is fraught with consequences too
important to be dwelt on here, and, if unexplained, would force us
largely to qualify our encomium.
It might be supposed that the ties between Austria and America are
neither numerous nor close, and that consequently the Minister to Vienna
would find but a narrow field for the display of his qualities as a
diplomatist. Accordingly we find Mr Motley, in the dearth of other
matter, falling back upon the grand resource of American politicians,
and discussing English affairs as the most natural topic possible to
engage the attention of an envoy at Vienna. From that convenient point
of observation, then, he proceeds to enlighten the Washington Cabinet on
the disposition and intentions of the statesmen, and organs of the
press, of Great Britain; and as other ministers elsewhere imitate this
course, the Government of Mr Lincoln has the advantage of seeing British
policy represented, not merely in the aspect in which it is seen by Mr
Adams the special photographer, but as it appears when viewed by
amateurs from the various capitals of Europe.
Should a Tory Government succeed the present Cabinet, Mr Motley
anticipates much trouble. Nothing, he says, can exceed the virulence
with which the extreme Conservative party regard America, nor the
delight with which they look forward to its extinction as a nation. The
hatred to the English Radicals is, he has discovered, “the secret of the
ferocity and brutality with which the ‘Times,’ the ‘Saturday Review,’
and other Tory organs of the press, have poured out their insults upon
America ever since the war began.” How the journals thus classified may
approve being linked together as Tory organs, we cannot say. To
ourselves we, of course, see nothing personal in the general allusion,
our leaning to Radicalism and Republicanism being too notorious to admit
of any mistake. Subsequently Mr Motley writes a long essay about British
matters, explaining the sentiments of the “venerable Premier of England”
and our Foreign Minister, and criticising the speech made by Mr
Gladstone at Newcastle, part of which makes him very angry, and causes
him to express a hope that that statesman’s tongue may be blistered.
Nor, unusual as his style of diplomatic correspondence may appear, does
he stand quite alone in it.
It is possible that the godfathers and godmothers of Mr Cassius
Marcellus Clay are, in principal degree, responsible for the efforts
made by that gentleman to attain notoriety. It would be mean to sneak
obscurely about the world under such magnificent appellations. Better,
in such a case, be called John Thomas. Hence, without any quality
apparent that would entitle the bearer of these historic names to claim
distinction amid the company of a pothouse, his efforts to become known
in the world have been as unceasing as if he were some wronged genius
entitled to a hearing. At the outbreak of hostilities he launched from
Paris a tremendous defiance against our unfortunate country. Then he
published a letter in the ‘Times,’ telling us what we ought to do in the
American quarrel, and, in case we should not comply, threatening our
great-grandchildren with the vengeance of we forget how many millions of
unborn Yankees. At this time he was on his way to St Petersburg as
United States Minister to Russia. For his guidance he had received one
of Mr Seward’s most elaborate moral essays, beginning in this remarkable
way: “Sir,—Nations, like individuals, have three prominent wants: first,
freedom; secondly, prosperity; thirdly, friends. The United States early
secured the two first objects by the exercise of courage and enterprise.
But, although they have always practised singular moderation, they
nevertheless have been slow in winning friends.” Fortified with a great
deal of this kind of composition, Mr Clay arrived in the Russian
capital. From his own correspondence we learn that he found the Emperor
“absent in the direction of Moscow,” and being advised by the
Assistant-Secretary of State to await his Majesty’s return, “I
presumed,” he says, “it would not be agreeable to the Emperor for me to
follow on.” In a few days he had an interview with Prince Gortchakoff,
who “asked after Pickens” (whether Pickens is something, or some place,
or somebody, does not appear), “my family, and other things in a
familiar way, when I was dismissed by again shaking hands.” Soon after
we learn that he and “his suite, Green Clay, William C. Goodloe, and T.
Williams,” set out for Peterhoff, where the Emperor received them, and
addressed Mr Clay in a set speech, which was delivered in Russian,
though, says he, “the Emperor spoke American mostly.” We are at liberty,
therefore, to suppose that his Majesty, during great part of the
interview, spoke through his nose; and, no doubt, Prince Gortchakoff,
who spoke only English, beheld with wonder, not unmixed with envy, this
exhibition of his Imperial master’s accomplishments as a linguist.
Mr Clay then addressed to the Emperor an essay on the moral government
of Russia, which, from internal evidence, we pronounce to have been
learnt by heart from a prize paper by Seward. “The Emperor,” he says,
“seemed much gratified and really moved by this last remark,” possibly
because it was the last; and, besides speaking Russian and American,
Alexander was so ostentatious as to conclude the interview by speaking
English, perhaps deeming it appropriate to the subject-matter. “He
wanted to know if I thought England would interfere. I told him we did
not care what she did; that her interference would tend to unite us the
more; that we fought the South with reluctance; we were much
intermarried and of a common history; but that the course of England had
aroused our sensibilities towards her in no very pleasant manner. The
Emperor seemed to like my defiance of old John Bull very much. He wanted
to know if I was a relative of Henry Clay, and what was my military
rank. I told him I was only a distant relation of Clay, and that I wore
the uniform of an American colonel” (borrowed, perhaps, from another
relation, Pipe Clay), “which rank I filled in my own country.” His
Majesty then shook hands twice with the Ambassador, and dismissed him.
Before concluding the despatch from which we learn the foregoing
interesting particulars, it seems to have occurred to Mr Clay that it
would be judicious to show Mr Seward that moralising on the war was a
game which two could play at; and he wound up in the following style:—
“I have already made this letter too long; but I cannot conclude
without saying how much more and more I value the great and
inestimable blessings of our Government, and how I trust in God that
no compromise will be made of the great idea for which we have so long
fought, but that General Scott, following out the programme of Mr
Lincoln’s inaugural, will _slowly_ and _surely_ subdue the rebellion,
‘stock, lock, and gun-barrel,’ ‘hook and line, bob and sinker,’ and
that we may all be spared to see once more the glorious old banner
restored,—‘Liberty and union, now and for ever—one and inseparable.’”
These extracts from the Clay correspondence of 1861 will no doubt cause
the reader keenly to regret that we cannot give more. But the fact is
that, whether Mr Seward was jealous of Mr Clay’s native humour as
displayed in these papers, or considered him a formidable rival as a
moral essayist, or whatever the cause might be, the omissions are so
numerous that a great part of the Ambassador’s correspondence consists
of asterisks, leaving only the driest details, such as any ordinary John
Thomas or Green Clay might have written. So numerous are the stars
between the stripes of print, that the successive pages look like so
many representations of the American banner. But in January last year he
wrote an essay on the subject of the perfidy and general villainy of
Great Britain, which has fortunately been preserved entire. “In this
critical time,” he says, “whether war or peace with England ensues, I
deem it my duty to give the President my impressions of European
sentiment.” He then details the reasons why the monarchies and
aristocracies of Europe have always regarded his republic with jealousy.
“Their jealousy, their secret hate, their blind vengeance verges,” Mr
Clay thinks, “upon insanity;.... they renew with us the fable of the
wolf and the lamb; though we are below on the mountain stream, we are
accused of muddying the waters.” His method of dealing with Secession is
tersely expressed—“I have always thought that the whole property of the
rebels, slaves and all, should be summarily confiscated.” But before
prescribing this treatment for the South, he devotes a paragraph to the
way in which England should be handled:—
“In case of war with England,” he says, “Canada should be seized at
all hazards. A large force should be first placed in fortifications in
some place suitable near the coast, which would cut off reinforcements
from England. Union with us, with equal rights, should be offered the
Canadians, and the lives and property of friends secured. Men and
money should be sent to Ireland, India, and all the British dominions
all over the world, to stir up revolt. Our cause is just; and
vengeance will sooner or later overtake that perfidious aristocracy.”
Such was the esteem in which the Cabinet of Washington held either the
practical qualities evinced in this essay, or the diplomatic services
veiled under the asterisks, that they were considered to entitle him, on
his return to America, to the position of a Brigadier-General. In the
records of the war we cannot, however, find that Brigadier Cassius
Marcellus ever performed any military achievement worthy either of the
foe of Cæsar or the foe of Hannibal. He seems to have worn his warlike
honours with remarkable meekness, and never to have done anything to
fulfil his own aspiration that “liberty and union may be for ever
inseparable,” by taking the smallest step towards the subjugation of the
enemy. Under these circumstances Mr Seward, finding his military so
inferior to his diplomatic talents, seems to have thought that the
Brigadier who had failed to bid defiance to the South would find a more
appropriate field of action in resuming his employment of gratifying the
Emperor of Russia with other defiances of “old John Bull”—and
accordingly we learn that the eminent statesman either is, or is to be,
once more Minister to St Petersburg, and may possibly be at this moment
engaged in his favourite occupations of shaking the hand of the Emperor,
and shaking his own hand at the British monarchy. If it be so, we may
perhaps hope to read, in another state paper, of his second reception at
the Court of Russia—which, judging from the familiar cordiality
displayed in the first, may, if the Czar should again deign to express
himself in the American language, open something in this way,—“Wal,
Cassius M. Clay, how air you, old hoss? Do you feel pretty brisk and
spry, sir? How is it you ha’n’t chawed up them rebels yet, lock, stock,
and gun-barrel, hook and line, bob and sinker? What do you think of
_our_ insurrection to Poland, sir?”
Future volumes of these documents will probably reveal Mr Seward as
still assuring his correspondents that the end of the rebellion is at
hand; that foreign Governments will soon see dire reason to repent their
hostility; that the Union is growing stronger with every “reverse of our
arms;” that discord and desertion and corruption are only “fresh
developments of patriotism;” and that the flooding of the lands on the
Mississippi, far from being an act of barbarous vindictiveness, will be
as beneficent in its consequences as the overflowing of the Nile. We
shall probably see, too, that American envoys, addressing themselves,
not to Mr Seward, but to the masses behind him, his masters and theirs,
are still denouncing our perfidious aristocracy and jealous monarchy. Is
it a comedy or a tragedy that these men are acting? If unconscious
absurdity and ludicrous unfitness for the conduct of grave affairs were
all the elements of the exhibition, we might well afford to laugh; but,
unfortunately, the grotesque display has its terrible side, and
incapacity and conceit only increase the tremendous power of mischief
wielded by the principal characters in the burlesque. Meanwhile the
course of foreign Governments is not likely to be materially affected by
the lucubrations of the American Secretary of State; and, amidst the
strange displays of weakness made by the North, not the least strange
will be the futility of its diplomacy.
THE BUDGET.
The soundness of the position taken up by the Opposition last year in
regard to the national finances, has this year been fully established by
the admissions and procedure of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It may
seem remarkable that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should preface his
financial statement by referring to a resolution of the House, which was
adopted at the instance of the Opposition,—that he should avowedly base
his present Budget upon that resolution. But Mr Gladstone is a Minister
of consummate Parliamentary tact, who avails himself of every plea which
best serves his purpose for the time; and, as we shall see in the
sequel, he had a special reason for thus seeking to cover with the
authority of Parliament a Budget which is not quite so accordant with
the resolution of the House as he desires it to be thought. The
resolution, which was adopted at the instance of the Opposition, and
upon which the Chancellor of the Exchequer professedly bases his present
Budget, insisted upon the necessity of reducing the national
expenditure. It was urged upon the Government that the financial
administration of the three previous years had been such as to trench
deeply upon the extraordinary resources of the country, and that, while
ostensibly adding to the military strength of the country, we were
really diminishing our power by exhausting the sources by which the
expenses of war and national defence could be sustained. It was pointed
out that during these years we had not only abolished, and put out of
reach, several important taxes for the remission of which there was no
urgent necessity, but that, in order to do so, we had actually incurred
a considerable deficit. Of late years not only the leaders of the
Opposition, but some of the highest financial authorities on the
Ministerial side of the House—including Lord Overstone, Lord Monteagle,
and Earl Grey—had denounced as most impolitic the hand-to-mouth system
pursued by Mr Gladstone, and had urged the necessity of framing the
estimates with a view to obtaining a substantial yearly surplus. These
were the considerations which led the House of Commons last summer to
adopt the resolution to which the Chancellor of the Exchequer now
appeals in justification of his Budget; and they must not be forgotten
when examining how far the financial programme of the present year is in
accordance with that resolution.
A new critic now takes the field against Mr Gladstone, and adds his
protest to those which have already been made by the other leading
financial authorities. In a new edition of his work on Taxation, that
veteran Liberal and political economist, Mr M’Culloch, severely
criticises the recent financial policy of the Government, and endorses
with his high and obviously impartial authority the opinions by which
that policy has been so often combated by the Conservatives. To all the
special features of Gladstonian finance Mr M’Culloch is opposed. He is
strongly in favour of the maintenance of a good yearly surplus, as an
indispensable feature of a prudent system of finance; he condemns as
most impolitic that narrowing of the area of taxation which Mr Gladstone
extols as a “simplification of the tariff;” and he moreover objects, in
the strongest terms, to the manner in which that principle of
“simplification” has been applied.
It is not surprising that the voice of protest should thus be raised
from all quarters against the principles of Mr Gladstone’s finance. To
begin with, he has been a most prodigal financier, and cares not a jot
for the future. At a time when the charges on the National Debt were
reduced by the falling-in of the terminable annuities, to the extent of
two millions a-year—when there was an unexpected repayment of a portion
of the Spanish loan, and other windfalls—and when he found a surplus of
considerable amount left to him by his predecessors in office,—then
surely, if ever, the country had a right to expect from the Chancellor
of the Exchequer a succession of good annual balance-sheets. If the
policy of maintaining a substantial surplus is not carried out under
these favourable circumstances, the fault must lie with the
administrator of the national finances. Yet, so far has Mr Gladstone
been from adhering to the old and sound maxim of financial policy, that
he has not only given us no surplus, but has recklessly incurred us a
deficit, of which he now makes no mention. Had this bad condition of the
finances been incurred in consequence of an exceptional increase of the
national expenditure which could only be met by the imposition of new
taxes, it might have been excusable. But there was no such difficulty:
the revenue was sufficient, if let alone, to have more than kept pace
with the expenditure. The peculiar culpability of Mr Gladstone as a
financial Minister—the pernicious feature of his system which called
forth the eloquent denunciation of Lord Overstone, and the emphatic
protest of Earl Grey and Lord Monteagle, and of the ablest financial
journal of the Liberal party, the ‘Economist’—is, that during this
period of so-called exceptional expenditure he has deliberately thrown
away the means which were at his disposal for meeting it. He has
abolished taxes against which there was no peculiar ground of complaint,
and he has reduced others in order to cheapen certain commodities for
which there was no general demand.
This financial system of Mr Gladstone is, unfortunately, not a mere
thing of the past. Its consequences weigh upon us now, and there is no
sign of his abandoning it. It is a novel system—novel even to himself;
but he adheres to it with an obstinacy which threatens to embarrass us
in the future not less than in the past. A grave question must be at
stake when the greatest financial authorities of the Liberal party come
forward prominently to side with the Conservatives in opposing and
denouncing the policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. They feel
strongly that the recent hand-to-mouth system of Mr Gladstone will not
do, and that in times of emergency it would entail grave disaster upon
the national fortunes. “Great nations—such, for example, as England and
France,” says Mr M’Culloch, “with colonies and dependencies in all parts
of the world, and with jealous and powerful neighbours, must expect to
be every now and then involved in difficulties; and on that account they
should have a considerable surplus revenue—_i. e._, a considerable
surplus after defraying the cost of their usual establishments,” And he
adds—“Had the affair in regard to the Trent led, as it was not unlikely
to do, to a war with the United States, it would have found us in an
awkward situation—without any surplus revenue, with discredited customs
and excise duties, and nothing to fall back upon but an increase of the
Income-tax and loans.” We regret to say that the calamity from which we
so narrowly escaped two years ago, cannot be regarded as unlikely of
occurrence now; and there are also elements of strife sufficiently
formidable on our own side of the Atlantic to engage the thoughts of our
statesmen, and to invest with peculiar interest the at all times
momentous subject of the national finances. When we hear so old a
Liberal and so practised a political economist as Mr M’Culloch echoing
Lord Castlereagh, and charging the country in the very words of the Tory
statesman, with an “ignorant impatience of taxation,” we cannot but be
confirmed in the views which we have repeatedly expressed in regard to
the policy of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer; and the country
at large will do well to reconsider that policy and the principle upon
which it is based.
On one occasion in 1857, when the late Sir G. C. Lewis—whose death is a
loss alike to the country and to the Ministry—referred to an opinion of
one who had as good a knowledge of the practical working of taxation as
any man either before or since, Mr Gladstone exclaimed with the utmost
contempt—“He goes back to Arthur Young, sir: old Arthur Young he takes
for his authority!” And when, in his own recent Budget speech, Mr
Gladstone, with all the ingenuity of rhetoric, was calling upon the
House to stand amazed at the rapid increase in the [nominal?] income of
the country (one-fifth during eight years), which he claimed as the
result of his policy,—and Sir J. Packington quietly suggested that it is
Australia and the new gold mines that have caused the difference,—Mr
Gladstone rejoined, “Australia! Oh no: the right honourable gentleman is
lost in the depths of heresy on that point.” This overbearing
presumption is natural to Mr Gladstone, who finds it a convenient way of
summarily evading difficulties which are more easily scoffed at than
answered. But we take leave to think that there are few intelligent men
in this country who, for width of view and soundness of judgment, would
not have preferred the late Sir George Lewis to his more eloquent and
ingenious colleague. And for ourselves we entertain no doubt that Sir J.
Pakington was perfectly correct in his suggestion, and that the great
increase alike in the income of this country, and in certain branches of
the expenditure, is in part attributable to the rise in the monetary
value of property and labour in consequence of the new markets for our
goods in Australia, and the great addition to the stock of gold.[9] Mr
Gladstone would probably treat Mr M’Culloch in the same contemptuous
fashion,—especially as Mr M’Culloch’s opinions and arguments, if
correct, totally demolish the “system” which Mr Gladstone of late years,
and in contradiction to his former self, has been labouring to
establish. But we shall give the public an opportunity of judging
whether Mr M’Culloch’s opinions are not as well founded as they are
harmonious with those of the Conservative party.
Mr M’Culloch maintains that it is more than doubtful whether any
remission of taxation should take place unless the revenue exceed the
ordinary expenditure by some 5 or 10 per cent of its amount. In other
words, he considers that, with an expenditure equal to that of the
United Kingdom, the estimates should always be so framed as to have a
conjectural balance of four or five millions. Mr Gladstone rarely aims
at having a surplus of even a tenth of that amount; and sometimes
£80,000 or less seems to him enough to meet the chapter of accidents,
and sustain the moral power and financial credit of the country! The
following passage, which appears in the new edition of Mr M’Culloch’s
work, seems to have been written expressly in reference to the financial
administration of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer:—
“In countries under free or constitutional governments the reduction
or repeal of taxes is frequently proposed in the view of courting
popularity, or of favourably influencing public opinion. And the
desire to grasp an immediate advantage, to be relieved of a burden,
without caring for the ultimate consequences of its extinction, is so
extremely prevalent, that such projects, though often very
undeserving, seldom fail to procure a less or greater share of the
public sympathy for those by whom they are put forth. Statesmen,
however, and those intrusted with the duties of government, should
take a less circumscribed view of such matters, and are bound to
inquire into the real character of the measures that come before them,
and to weigh and consider their more remote as well as their proximate
results. Their duty is to oppose, not to pander to the selfish and
unfounded prejudices of the public.... The real questions are, can the
tax be spared; and, if not, can it be replaced by a less inconvenient
or injurious tax? If it can neither be spared nor replaced by another
that is less objectionable, its repeal would be as futile, as
inexpedient, and as unadvised a measure as can well be imagined.”
Mr Gladstone, in his desire for popularity, has carried the practice
thus emphatically condemned by Mr M’Culloch to a most dangerous extreme.
He totally disregards the sound principle of ending every year with a
surplus, in order to meet sudden and unforeseen contingencies, and he
lavishes every spare pound upon the reduction of taxation. Moreover, in
making these reductions, he has adopted a practice which, although he
presents it under the attractive guise of a “simplification of the
tariff,” is paving the way for a serious popular agitation against some
of the indispensable elements of our fiscal system. Sir Robert Peel, it
is true, simplified the tariff; but he did so more wisely and prudently.
It was not merely for the sake of simplicity that he reduced the list of
taxed commodities, but because many of the taxes at that time vexed
trade without appreciably swelling the revenue. Previous to his
administration, our customs tariff comprised above a thousand articles,
many of which were insignificant, and all but unproductive to the State.
But Mr Gladstone has carried out the same practice on a very different
principle. The tariff, as left by Sir Robert Peel, embraced above four
hundred items; now it is restricted to about forty. Indeed, this branch
of our revenue at present is raised almost entirely from sugar, tea,
tobacco, spirits, wine, beer, corn, coffee, currants and raisins,
timber, and pepper. This is objectionable in many respects. In the first
place, it renders our revenue liable to be much more seriously affected
by the fluctuations of trade and the condition of the masses of the
people, than under the old system; and by concentrating taxation upon a
few commodities, it makes the fiscal pressure more obvious and more
felt, and furnishes proportionately greater scope for popular agitation.
“When the public attention is fixed exclusively on a few leading and
indeed necessary articles,” says Mr M’Culloch, “it is all but certain
that the duties on them, even should they be moderate, will come to be
looked upon as being, in no ordinary degree, objectionable and
oppressive. But were a great variety of articles, suitable for the
consumption of all classes, subject to duties, there would be but little
probability of the public attention being concentrated on a few only.”
And what are the few commodities which now furnish the principal part of
our revenue? As we have seen, precisely those which are consumed in
greatest quantity by the bulk of the people. There is no real inequality
in the distribution of our taxation; for the Income-Tax, the
Succession-Duties, &c., do not fall at all upon the lower classes, and
have been framed so as to keep the balance of taxation equal between the
rich and the poor. But we fear this fact will not be fairly considered
by the masses, who, under the influence of demagogues like Mr Bright,
are too prone to think themselves unjustly dealt with. Two months ago we
pointed out this feature of Mr Gladstone’s financial policy, as one
eminently provocative of agitation against some branches of our revenue
which it is indispensable to preserve. Mr M’Culloch holds a similar
opinion. He says—
“When such duties apply to all kinds of things [the raw materials of
industry and the prime articles of food being excepted], it is seen
that they must affect, in one way or other, every class, and, indeed,
every individual, and being merged in and forming a part of the price
of the articles on which they are charged, they attract little or no
attention. But such will not be the case with us in time to come.
Consumption duties have ceased to be general, and are now (1862)
unfortunately restricted to a few leading articles, comprising some of
the principal necessaries and luxuries of the labouring poor. So
striking and momentous a change cannot fail to rouse the public
attention; and will, it is to be feared, give rise to a belief that it
is essentially partial and unfair. And such belief will be better
founded than it is at all desirable it should be; for, while we admit
various luxuries of the rich and the great, including the most
_recherché_ wines, at very low duties, and many more, comprising,
among others, the finest laces, velvets, porcelain, tablecloths,
carpets, silks, gloves, ornamental furniture, bronzes, and so forth,
free of all charge, we lay heavy duties on the tea and sugar, which
are indispensable to the labouring poor, and heavier still on the
tobacco, the spirits, and the beer which constitute their luxuries. Is
it to be supposed that such a policy should be considered by the bulk
of the people as other than unfair and offensive?”
It is a most important principle of judicious finance that the incidence
of taxation should be as little felt as possible, and also that it
should not only be fair, but be seen to be fair. We believe that the
present taxation of this country falls very equally on all classes; but,
unfortunately, under Mr Gladstone’s “reforms,” it has assumed an
appearance of gross inequality. We have largely increased the spirit
duties, and we have kept up the taxes on malt and beer, yet we have
greatly reduced the duties on wine. Moreover, we have made the reduction
of the duties on wines in such a way that the finest wines pay no more
than the cheap wines. Several articles of luxury have likewise, under
the operation of the French treaty, disappeared from the tariff, and
their absence, though of no great importance as affecting the revenue,
gives a handle to demagogues who desire to excite the masses against the
taxation of the country. The “Financial Reform Association,” and the
Radical party in general, could have no better ally than Mr Gladstone;
and the chief result of his “popular” Budgets will inevitably be to
render our whole system of taxation extremely unpopular.
Mr Gladstone’s new Budget is less ingenious, less experimental, less
obviously hazardous, than those which have preceded it. The balance is,
in appearance at least, kept even between direct and indirect taxation:
and the twopence off the income-tax, and the fivepence off the duties on
tea, reduce these taxes to the level at which they stood prior to the
Russian war. The modification of the Income-tax upon incomes between
£100 and £200 a-year is an improvement. Mr Gladstone has also done well
in admitting a past error of his, by abolishing the small charges on
certain operations, of trade which he imposed in 1860, but which have
been found exceedingly vexatious to commerce. Nor can any objection be
taken to the change which he proposes to make on the taxation of
railways, by which the tax on the passenger traffic is reduced from 5 to
3½ per cent, while the exemption at present enjoyed by parliamentary and
excursion trains is abolished. His proposal to levy the Income-tax upon
the revenues of corporations which are expended in charity, and on the
income of endowed charities, is more open to question; and so are some
of his other minor proposals; but the interests affected are not
sufficiently powerful to offer much opposition to the Government.
The main facts of Mr Gladstone’s financial statement are briefly as
follows. Warned by the strong expression of opinion on the part of the
House in favour of a reduction of expenditure, the Government resolved
to anticipate farther opposition by curtailing the estimates which the
House had so reluctantly voted, and last year spent about £800,000 less
than they had taken power to do. In respect to the Revenue, Mr
Gladstone’s estimates were singularly at fault. As on previous
occasions, his estimate of the Excise greatly exceeded the actual
return, which this year has fallen short of his estimate by more than a
million sterling. But the Income-tax yielded nearly half a million more
than he calculated, and so have the Customs; and the total produce of
the national taxes has been so favourable as to leave a surplus of about
£400,000 above the estimate, and an excess of £1,300,000 above the
expenditure. The revenue of the past year amounted to £70,603,000, the
expenditure was £69,302,000: surplus £1,301,000. If the taxes were to
remain on the same footing this year, they would yield (according to Mr
Gladstone) £71,490,000; and he proposes some trifling new taxes
amounting to £133,000: together equal to £71,623,000. And as the
estimated expenditure for the ensuing year is only £67,749,000
(£1,553,000 less than last year’s), the surplus at the end of the
ensuing year, if the taxes were kept at their present rate, would be
£3,874,000. But the proposed reductions of taxation, chiefly on the
Income-tax and Tea-duties, will cause a loss of revenue in the ensuing
year to the extent of £3,343,000; so that the actual surplus, as
estimated by Mr Gladstone, will be £531,000. The Budget stands thus:
REVENUE.
Customs, £22,737,000
Excise, 17,658,000
Stamps, 9,000,000
Taxes, 3,160,000
Income-tax, 8,675,000
Post Office, 3,800,000
Crown Lands, 300,000
Miscellaneous, 2,950,000
———————————
£68,280,000
EXPENDITURE.
Debt, £26,333,000
Consolidated Fund, 1,940,000
Army, 15,060,000
Navy, 10,730,000
Collection, 4,721,000
Miscellaneous, 8,965,000
———————————
£67,749,000
Surplus, £531,000.
The surplus which Mr Gladstone thus reckons upon this year is far below
the amount which our best financiers consider requisite for the
maintenance of a sound system of finance. It is true, and we attach
great weight to the consideration, that the present depressed state of
an important branch of national industry renders it desirable that the
taxation of the country should be reduced as low as possible. But this
argument, unhappily, cuts two ways. For the same depression of trade,
which calls for a minimum of taxation this year, to at least a similar
extent places in jeopardy the surplus which the Chancellor of the
Exchequer reckons upon. In his estimate of the produce of the excise,
especially, we believe that he commits his usual mistake of being too
sanguine. But the really hazardous feature of his Budget consists in
this: That only a part of the proposed reductions of taxation will take
effect during the ensuing year; and, therefore, the estimates which
suffice for the financial year, upon which we have entered, will be
inadequate for the year following. The reductions of taxation which will
take place before April next will, as we have said, amount to
£3,343,000; but the total yearly loss of revenue consequent upon the
reductions proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is £4,242,000;
so that if they took entire effect during the present year, instead of a
surplus of £531,000, there would be a deficit of £368,000. But of the
loss on the Income-tax, £850,000 will only fall on the following year
(1864–5), and £49,000 of loss from the abolition of some petty taxes
will likewise be passed on to next year. Thus we obtain a surplus of
£531,000 for the present financial year only by passing on to next year
a loss of £900,000. If the finances had been in a thoroughly good
condition, and if the state of the country promised to be prosperous,
and our relations with other Powers peaceful, the heavy legacy of loss
for the year 1864–5 might be contemplated with less alarm; for the
experience of late years shows that, in ordinary times, the
productiveness of the revenue tends to augment at the rate of £700,000
a-year. But this is not the case. And, moreover, as Mr Gladstone’s
estimate of the miscellaneous receipts for the present year embrace half
a million sterling of the China indemnity money—a payment which will not
take place again—the deficit which we are preparing for the year 1864–5,
is an exceedingly formidable one = £1,400,000.
This is the weak point of Mr Gladstone’s Budget. Suppose his
expectations are fully realised—suppose he have a surplus at the end of
this year of half a million, and that the productiveness of the taxes
increase next year to the extent of £700,000 (which is not
likely),—there would nevertheless be a deficit in the year 1864–5 of
£200,000. Such a result, the most favourable that can be expected,
cannot be regarded with indifference. But this is not all. Is it not a
fact that the balances in the Exchequer in March last year were
£2,684,000 less than they were in 1860, when Mr Gladstone began his
present financial administration? And as he does not take any account of
that deficit in his new Budget, the deficit remains unprovided for, and
of course renders his present financial programme doubly hazardous. It
was only by the help of the two and a half millions abstracted from the
Exchequer balances, and also by creating new Debt to the extent of
£461,000, that he escaped bankruptcy during the two first years of his
financial administration: and if he had been a Minister of ordinary
prudence, he would have felt bound to replace those sums before he
proceeded to make further reductions of taxation. But he is determined
to produce popular Budgets, however dear a price the country may have to
pay for them in the long run. He justifies anew the censure which Mr
M’Culloch has passed upon such a system of finance. He makes the show of
a surplus for the ensuing year, only by ignoring nearly three millions
of deficit which he has accumulated in past years, and by preparing a
new deficit for the year 1864–5.
Every proposal to reduce taxation is sure to be popular,—we are equally
sure that the present reductions are exceedingly dangerous. It is one
thing to cut down expenditure—and this, we conceive, was what the
Conservatives last year urged upon the Government: it is quite another
thing to dispense with a real surplus, to resign ourselves to a past
deficit, and prepare for ourselves a new one. The errors of Mr
Gladstone’s previous Budgets now begin to weigh heavy upon the national
fortunes. The abandonment of the paper-duties has rendered our present
financial position one of no ordinary embarrassment. Had these duties
still been in operation, the present reductions of taxation, so
desirable in themselves, and so repeatedly called for by the
Conservative party, could have been effected without any risk. As it is,
we think the financial position of the country eminently unsatisfactory
and unsafe. Not only must we experience a deficit in the year 1864–5,
but we are totally unprepared for any untoward contingencies in the
present year. The peace of Europe (if peace it may be called) is
obviously insecure; hostilities seem impending between this country and
Japan; and our relations with the Federal States of North America are
such as, unhappily, and from no fault of ours, to render the occurrence
of war between the two countries a contingency which cannot entirely be
overlooked. But if any exceptional expenditure be forced upon us, how
are we to meet it? Under Mr Gladstone’s management, the taxation of the
country has been so concentrated upon a few articles of universal
consumption, and the duty upon some of those commodities (such as
spirits) has been so obviously carried to the highest possible point,
that to increase the revenue from its present sources would be extremely
difficult and unpopular. We cannot reimpose the old duties on wines,
silks, gloves, and other articles embraced in the French treaty, for in
respect to these we have sold our freedom of taxation to a foreign
power. The paper duties are irretrievably abandoned; for, however
impolitic may have been the abolition of those duties in times like the
present, their reimposition would be a great hardship and injustice to
the manufacturers who have made new arrangements in accordance with the
abolition. A few months hence the same will be the case with the
Tea-duties. _A large increase of the Income-tax_, and an issue of
Exchequer bonds, are the only means by which we can hope to make head
against an emergency. The surplus is merely nominal—the balances in the
Exchequer cannot be further reduced,—and even the issue of Exchequer
bonds can be resorted to only to a small extent, in consequence of Mr
Gladstone’s repeated postponement of paying off, as they fell due, the
amounts already in circulation. Over the term of Mr Gladstone’s present
financial administration, as over his previous one, the country will yet
have to write the words, so damnatory of the reputation of a statesman,
_Improvidus futuri_. In the present aspect of affairs, we begin to think
anew of his Budgets before the Crimean War; and we can only hope that
the year 1864 will not be like 1854, and that the country will not find
itself again in straits and embarrassments like those which proved
wellnigh overwhelming ten years ago.
_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._
-----
Footnote 1:
‘Prehistoric Man; Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the
Old and the New World.’ By Daniel Wilson, LL. D., Professor of History
and English Literature in University College, Toronto; Author of the
‘Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland,’ &c. Macmillan & Co.,
Cambridge.
Footnote 2:
There is one instance of a fragment of human bone found in company
with these flints, but we have heard doubts thrown on the nature of
this fragment.
Footnote 3:
‘The Life of General Sir Howard Douglas, Bart, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.,
F.R.S., D.C.L. From his Notes, Conversations, and Correspondence.’ By
S. W. Fullom. John Murray, London.
Footnote 4:
Fact.
Footnote 5:
Heldreich (author of ‘An Essay on the Useful Plants of Greece’) finds
it in a single oak forest in Elis.
Footnote 6:
According to the prevalent opinion: the high authority of Decandolle
is the other way; he believes it indigenous in the South of Europe
generally; but the contrary evidence is very strong.
Footnote 7:
It was noted as something semi-prodigious that a palm-tree took root
at Rome, in the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol, during the war with
Perseus; and another in the pavement of Augustus’s house on the
Palatine.—Ampère, ‘L’Histoire Romaine à Rome.’
Footnote 8:
Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861, 1862. Washington.
Footnote 9:
The _Times_ itself takes this view. After stating that “no one doubts
that Australia, like India, China, and other countries, has
contributed to the prosperity of our trade by developing its own
resources, pastoral, metallic, or otherwise,” it makes this important
admission: “It is also true that Australia and California, by
increasing enormously the quantity of gold in the world, have
diminished its value; so that, _even if the wealth of the country had
not increased, its amount, as represented in gold_ [_i. e._ its value
in money] _would certainly have been larger_.” This alteration in the
value of money since 1853 is the main explanation of the fact which
seems to Mr Gladstone “so strange as to be almost incredible,” but
which he coolly attributes to “the legislation of Parliament setting
free the industry and intelligence of the British people.” This, he
says, is “the real and new cause that has been in operation,” and
which has so marvellously increased the wealth of the country 20 per
cent in eight years! But if this were the case, surely he need not cut
his estimates so fine. A nation that has grown so enormously rich in a
few years’ time could well afford to keep a good balance at its
banker’s—_i. e._, in the Exchequer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 71, NO. 439, MAY, 1852 ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
