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 _naïve_, peculiar irony of humour--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 humour 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 civilisation, 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 Fin in his rein-deer 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
Phœnicians, 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 distinctions of race. 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
differing tribes, races improved and quickened into the refinements
of civilisation. 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 neighbours, 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 which he became,
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 civiliser of the globe, as he becomes, when he knows
not through what channels--French, Flemish, Danish, Welch, 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
hut 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 civilisation 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 favourite 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 calm 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 grand eras 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 honour,
and the sweet harmonising 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 Bruyère. 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 humours. 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.