Uncle Roland was gone. Before he went, he was closeted for an hour with
my father, who then accompanied him to the gate; and we all crowded
round him as he stepped into his chaise. When the Captain was gone, I
tried to sound my father as to the cause of so sudden a departure. But
my father was impenetrable in all that related to his brother's secrets.
Whether or not the Captain had ever confided to him the cause of his
displeasure with his son,--a mystery which much haunted me,--my father
was mute on that score both to my mother and myself. For two or three
days, however, Mr. Caxton was evidently unsettled. He did not even take
to his Great Work, but walked much alone, or accompanied only by the
duck, and without even a book in his hand. But by degrees the scholarly
habits returned to him; my mother mended his pens, and the work went on.
For my part, left much to myself, especially in the mornings, I began to
muse restlessly over the future. Ungrateful. that I was, the happiness
of home ceased to content me. I heard afar the roar of the great world,
and roved impatient by the shore.
At length, one evening, my father, with some modest hums and ha's, and
an unaffected blush on his fair forehead, gratified a prayer frequently
urged on him, and read me some portions of the Great Work. I cannot
express the feelings this lecture created,--they were something akin to
awe. For the design of this book was so immense, and towards its
execution a learning so vast and various had administered, that it
seemed to me as if a spirit had opened to me a new world, which had
always been before my feet, but which my own human blindness had
hitherto concealed from me. The unspeakable patience with which all
these materials had been collected, year after year; the ease with which
now, by the calm power of genius, they seemed of themselves to fall into
harmony and system; the unconscious humility with which the scholar
exposed the stores of a laborious life,---all combined to rebuke my own
restlessness and ambition, while they filled me with a pride in my
father which saved my wounded egotism from a pang. Here, indeed, was
one of those books which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of
Bayle, or the History of Gibbon, or the "Fasti Hellenici" of Clinton, it
was a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the
originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace
all vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came
the new coin, with its single stamp. And, happily, the subject of the
work did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his naive, peculiar
irony of humor, so quiet, yet so profound. My father's book was the
"History of Human Error." It was, therefore, the moral history of
mankind, told with truth and earnestness, yet with an arch, unmalignant
smile. Sometimes, indeed, the smile drew tears. But in all true humor
lies its germ, pathos. Oh! by the goddess Moria, or Folly, but he was
at home in his theme. He viewed man first in the savage state,
preferring in this the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to
the vague myths of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our
pristine state. From Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of
mortality unadorned, as lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and
savages all his life. Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought
before you the American Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into
the dawn of civilization, when Friend Penn cheated him out of his
birthright, and the Anglo-Saxon drove him back into darkness. He showed
both analogy and contrast between this specimen of our kind and others
equally apart from the extremes of the savage state and the cultured,--
the Arab in his tent, the Teuton in his forests, the Greenlander in his
boat, the Finn in his reindeer car. Up sprang the rude gods of the
North and the resuscitated Druidism, passing from its earliest
templeless belief into the later corruptions of crommell and idol. Up
sprang, by their side, the Saturn of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of
India, the elementary deities of the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of
Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the
graceful Etruria. How nature and life shaped the religion; how the
religion shaped the manners; how, and by what influences, some tribes
were formed for progress; how others were destined to remain stationary,
or be swallowed up in war and slavery by their brethren,--was told with
a precision clear and strong as the voice of Fate. Not only an
antiquarian and philologist, but an anatomist and philosopher, my father
brought to bear on all these grave points the various speculations
involved in the distinction of races. He showed how race in perfection
is produced, up to a certain point, by admixture; how all mixed races
have been the most intelligent; how, in proportion as local circumstance
and religious faith permitted the early fusion of different tribes,
races improved and quickened into the refinements of civilization. He
tracked the progress and dispersion of the Hellenes from their mythical
cradle in Thessaly, and showed how those who settled near the sea-
shores, and were compelled into commerce and intercourse with strangers,
gave to Greece her marvellous accomplishments in arts and letters,--the
flowers of the ancient world. How others, like the Spartans; dwelling
evermore in a camp, on guard against their neighbors, and rigidly
preserving their Dorian purity of extraction, contributed neither
artists, nor poets, nor philosophers to the golden treasure-house of
mind. He took the old race of the Celts, Cimry, or Cimmerians. He
compared the Celt who, as in Wales, the Scotch Highlands, in Bretagne,
and in uncomprehended Ireland, retains his old characteristics and
purity of breed, with the Celt whose blood, mixed by a thousand
channels, dictates from Paris the manners and revolutions of the world.
He compared the Norman, in his ancient Scandinavian home, with that
wonder of intelligence and chivalry into which he grew, fused
imperceptibly with the Frank, the Goth, and the Anglo-Saxon. He
compared the Saxon, stationary in the land of Horsa, with the colonist
and civilizes of the globe as he becomes when he knows not through what
channels--French, Flemish, Danish, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish--he draws
his sanguine blood. And out from all these speculations, to which I do
such hurried and scanty justice, he drew the blessed truth, that carries
hope to the land of the Caffre, the but of the Bushman,--that there is
nothing in the flattened skull and the ebon aspect that rejects God's
law, improvement; that by the same principle which raises the dog, the
lowest of the animals in its savage state, to the highest after man--
viz., admixture of race--you can elevate into nations of majesty and
power the outcasts of humanity, now your compassion or your scorn. But
when my father got into the marrow of his theme; when, quitting these
preliminary discussions, he fell pounce amongst the would-be wisdom of
the wise; when he dealt with civilization itself, its schools, and
porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched beneath
the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks; when he
showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics, the
Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of
politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the
stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of
Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calin smile, into
the salons of the chattering wits of Paris in the eighteenth century,--
oh! then his irony was that of Lucian, sweetened by the gentle spirit of
Erasmus. For not even here was my father's satire of the cheerless and
Mephistophelian school. From this record of error he drew forth the
granderas of truth. He showed how earnest men never think in vain,
though their thoughts may be errors. He proved how, in vast cycles, age
after age, the human mind marches on, like the ocean, receding here, but
there advancing; how from the speculations of the Greek sprang all true
philosophy; how from the institutions of the Roman rose all durable
systems of government; how from the robust follies of the North came the
glory of chivalry, and the modern delicacies of honor, and the sweet,
harmonizing influences of woman. He tracked the ancestry of our Sidneys
and Bayards from the Hengists, Genserics, and Attilas. Full of all
curious and quaint anecdote, of original illustration, of those niceties
of learning which spring from a taste cultivated to the last exquisite
polish, the book amused and allured and charmed; and erudition lost its
pedantry, now in the simplicity of Montaigne, now in the penetration of
La Bruyere. He lived in each time of which he wrote, and the time lived
again in him. Ah! what a writer of romances he would have been if--if
what? If he had had as sad an experience of men's passions as he had
the happy intuition into their humors. But he who would see the mirror
of the shore must look where it is cast on the river, not the ocean.
The narrow stream reflects the gnarled tree and the pausing herd and the
village spire and the romance of the landscape. But the sea reflects
only the vast outline of the headland and the lights of the eternal
heaven.