We believe that the people of Kansas will spurn the bribe and refuse
to eat the dirt that is set before them for a banquet. They will
reject the insulting proffer with contempt, and fall back upon their
reserved right of resistance, passive or active, as their
circumstances may advise. They will not be so base as to desert the
post of honor they have sought in the great fight for freedom and
maintained so long and so well, disappointing and throwing into
confusion the distant allies who have stood behind them in their most
evil hours, for all the lands that President and Congress have to
give. It is, indeed, a momentous crisis for them, and we have faith
to believe that they will not be wanting to its demands. The eyes of
the lovers of liberty everywhere are earnestly watching to see how
they will come out from the ordeal by fire and by gold to which they
are subjected. What Boston was in 1775, and Paris in 1789, is Kansas
now,--the field on which a great battle for the right is to be fought.
Honor or infamy attends the issue of her action in the dilemma in
which the crafty malice of her enemies has placed her. If she agree
to take the dirty acres which are proffered to her as the price of
her integrity, she consents to take the yoke of Slavery upon her
neck and not even to attempt to shake herself free from it for six
years to come. We know that shuffling Democrats, and even
temporizing Republicans, represent that the people, after accepting
the Lecompton Constitution, can forthwith summon a Convention and
substitute another scheme of government in its stead. But this could
be initiated only by a breach of the promise they would have just
pledged, and could be carried through only by a revolution. Such a
course would be a direct violation of the philosophy of
Constitutional Government, which assumes as its fundamental axiom,
that Constitutions can be altered only in the way and according to
the conditions prescribed in themselves. Such a proceeding would be
a _coup d'état_, not as flagitious certainly as that of Bonaparte,
but to the full as revolutionary and illegal. And we may be sure
that the arm of the United States Government would not be shortened
so that it should not interpose and hinder such a defiance of itself
and the Power whose instrument it is. With servile and corrupt
judges at its beck and a majority in Congress within its purchase,
the occasion and means of such an interference would be readily
devised and supplied.
We believe that this line of policy would lead to an armed collision
with the General Government. It is for the oppressed inhabitants of
any country to say when their wrongs have reached the height which
justifies the drawing of the civil sword. We have neither the right
nor the disposition to advise the people of Kansas in a matter so
emphatically their own. But there is another way of coming to this
arbitrament,--inevitable, if they deviate a hair's-breadth from the
strict line of law,--should they deem there is no other remedy for
their wrongs. The admirable Constitution just framed at Leavenworth,
one well worthy of a free people that has been tried as with fire,
will be adopted before these lines are before the public eye. Let
them reject the Buchanan-English swindle, put their heel on the
Lecompton fraud, set up the Leavenworth Constitution, and erect a
State government under it in defiance of the Territorial Usurpation,
and they will soon find themselves face to face with the tyranny at
Washington. But is there not reason to hope that firmness and
patience may yet win the battle for freedom without resorting to so
serious an alternative? Is it indeed inevitable that Kansas must
remain out of the pale of the Union, under the oppression of the
Territorial laws, until the hirelings of the Government shall have
determined that slaves enough have been poured in to decide the
complexion of the new State, and shall authorize her to ask for
admission? We are told that the joy at Washington and elsewhere over
this "settlement" of the Kansas difficulty was because it was taken
out of Congress, and "Agitation" at an end. But what is to hinder
its being brought into Congress again?--and whose fault will it be,
if Agitation do not survive and grow mightier unto the victory? If
the present Congress can shut its doors against this intruder, its
power dies with itself, and it greatly lies with the people of Kansas
to make the next Congress one that shall rehabilitate them in their
rights. Their conduct at this pregnant moment may settle the
proximate destiny of the Republic, and decide whether the Slave
Power is to rule us by its underlings for four years more, or
whether its pride is to have a fall and its insolence a rebuke in
1860.
We all remember how often the Agitation of the Slavery question has
been done to death in Congress, and how sure it was to appear again
to startle its murderers from their propriety. Like "the
blood-boltered Banquo," it would confront again the eyes that had
hoped to look upon it no more. It would come back:
"With twenty mortal murders on its head
_To push them from their stools_!"
And this dreaded spectre, though a beneficent angel with healing on
his wings in truth, will push yet many traitorous or cowardly
sycophants from the stools they disgrace, and substitute in their
stead men who will quiet Agitation by Justice. Let the men of Kansas
remember that a yet greater trust than that of providing for their
own interests and rights is in their hands. The battle they are to
fight in this quarrel is for the whole North, for the whole country,
for the world. Let them address themselves unto it with calmness,
with prudence, with watchfulness, with courage. They are beset on
every side by crafty and desperate enemies. Greedy land-jobbers, in
haste to be rich, will try to persuade them that not to be innocent
is to be wise. Timid timeservers will urge a submission which
promises peace, though it be but a solitude that is called so.
Rampant Pro-slavery will exalt its horn against Righteousness and
try again the virtue of ruffianism to prevail against civilization.
The barbarians will hang anew upon the borders, ready to complete
the conquest they began so well. And above all, a majority of the men
who are to pass upon the votes are the creatures of the
Administration, who know, by the example of their predecessors, that
the suspicion of honesty will be fatal to all their hopes of
preferment, and that they can purchase reward only by procuring,
_quocunque modo_, the acceptance of the proposition of Congress.
But still the power is in the hands of the Free-State men, if they
choose to put it forth. Let them organize such a scrutiny everywhere,
that fraud and violence cannot escape detection and exposure. Let
them observe most rigidly all the technical rules imposed upon the
electors, that no vote may be lost. Let them come to the polls by
thousands, and trample under their feet the shabby bribe for which
they are asked to trade away their independence and their virtue.
Let them be thus faithful, and never be weary of maintaining the
Agitation, which is proved, by the very dread their enemies have of
it, to be the way to their victory. Thus they will be sure to triumph,
conquering their right to create their own government, and erect a
free commonwealth on the ruins of the tyranny they have overthrown.
And Kansas, at no distant period, will be welcomed by her Free
Sisters to her place among them, with no stain of bribes in her hands,
and with no soil of meanness upon her garments. And then the
"peace" and "prosperity," which President Buchanan saw in vision on
the eve of May-day, will indeed prevail and be established, while
the blackness of infamy will brood forever over the memory of the
magistrate who used the highest office of the Republic to perpetuate
the wrongs of the Slave by the sacrifice of the rights of the Citizen.
LITERARY NOTICES.
_Library of Old Authors.--Works of John Webster_. London: John
Russell Smith. 1856-57.
We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Webster. We wish he had
chosen Chapman; for Mr. Dyce's Webster is hardly out of print, and,
we believe, has just gone through a second and revised edition.
Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely
above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or
Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that
inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding,
made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent
declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of
character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great
dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a
rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of
Shakspeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely
a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no
balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction,
and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of
profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent
workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of
that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and
expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great
namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather
to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready
sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a
poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote
comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only
Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal
solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements
of a character, (as in _Falstaff_,) that any question of good or evil,
of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the apprehension of its
thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in _Panurge_; but, in
our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with
Shakspeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like
an approach to it, (for Moliere's quality was comic power rather
than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and Richter. Only Shakspeare
was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of
rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,--
that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with
almost inhuman impartiality,--that outlook whose range was ecliptical,
dominating all zones of human thought and action,--that power of
verisimilar conception which could take away _Richard III_ from
History, and _Ulysses_ from Homer,--and that creative faculty whose
equal touch is alike vivifying in _Shallow_ and in _Lear_. He alone
never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks
and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a
jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like
many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural
Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as
best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the
nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic
twilight of _Hamlet_. We are tired of the vagueness which classes
all the Elizabethan playwrights together as "great dramatists,"--as
if Shakspeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree.
Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of
poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in
combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of
earthly phenomena, to find them joined with those faculties of
perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union
which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that
Shakspeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His
contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call
"a humor" till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like
rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In
their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or
mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too
often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the
putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility
of Shakspeare's stand-point as poet and artist.
Webster's most famous works are "The Duchess of Malfy" and "Vittoria
Corombona," but we are strongly inclined to call "The Devil's
Law-Case" his best play. The two former are in a great measure
answerable for the "spasmodic" school of poets, since the
extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the
equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it.
Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination,
but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle's admirable
distinction between the _Horrible_ and the _Terrible_ in tragedy was
never better illustrated and confirmed than in the "Duchess" and
"Vittoria." His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in
it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be
sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the
fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the
Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose micacious sand, even, was
treasured as auriferous,--and no wonder, in a generation which
admired the "Botanic Garden." Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of
his day, and himself calls his "Vittoria Corombona" a "night-piece."
Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as
something pervading a whole character and making it consistent with
itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and
makes all the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the
catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck
out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase
for which it would be hard to find the match. The "prithee, undo
this button" of _Lear_, by which Shakspeare makes us feel the
swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bodily results of
mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all
intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is
hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth
of _Ferdinand_ when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by
his own procurement,--
"Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young."
He has not the condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning
into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a
cherry-stone with any of the _concellisti_, and abounds in
imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic
tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic
phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples:--
"Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon,
As some fantastics dream, I could wish all _men_,
The whole race of them, for their inconstancy,
Sent thither to people that!"
(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first
faithless lover, he adds,--
"And he invented _tents_, unless men lie,"--
implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.)
"Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds:
In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study,
For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea,
For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which
Arise and spring up honor."
("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)
"Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this,
She would not after the report keep fresh
So long as flowers on graves."
"For sin and shame are ever tied together
With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun,
They cannot without violence be undone."
"One whose mind
Appears more like a ceremonious chapel
Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence."
"Gentry? 'tis nought else
But a superstitious relic of time past;
And, sifted to the true worth, it is nothing
But ancient riches."
"What is death?
The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free
From Fortune's gunshot."
"It has ever been my opinion
That there are none love perfectly indeed,
But those that hang or drown themselves for love,"
says _Julio_, anticipating Butler's
"But he that drowns, or blows out's brains,
The Devil's in him, if he feigns."
He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron in their apophthegm
concerning woman's last love. In "The Devil's Law-Case," _Leonora_
says:
"For, as we love our youngest children best,
So the last fruit of our affection,
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong,
Most violent, most unresistible;
Since 'tis, indeed, our latest harvest-home,
Last merriment 'fore winter."
In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advantage (except in a
single doubtful play) of a predecessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce,
beyond all question the best living scholar of the literature of the
times of Elizabeth and James I. If he give no proof of remarkable
fitness for his task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and
painstaking. His notes are short and to the point, and--which we
consider a great merit--at the foot of the page. If he had added
a glossarial index, we should have been still better pleased.
Mr. Hazlitt seems to have read over the text with some care, and he
has had the good sense to modernize the orthography, or, as he says,
has "observed the existing standard of spelling throughout." Yet--for
what reason we cannot imagine--he prints "I" for "ay," taking the pains
to explain it every time in a note, and retains "banquerout" and
"coram" apparently for the sake of telling us that they mean
"bankrupt" and "quorum." He does not seem to have a quick ear for
scansion, which would sometimes have assisted him to the true reading.
We give an example or two:
"The obligation wherein we all stood bound
Cannot be concealed [_cancelled_] without great
reproach."
"The realm, not they,
Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold,
We are the people's factors."
"Shall not be o'erburdened [_overburdened_] in
our reign."
"A merry heart
And a good stomach to [a] feast are all."
"Have her meat serv'd up by bawds and
ruffians." [_dele_ "up."]
"Brother or father
In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to me."
"What's she in Rome your greatness cannot awe,
Or your rich purse purchase
Promises and threats." [_dele_ the second "your."]
"Through clouds of envy and disast [rous] change."
"The Devil drives; 'tis [it is] full time to go."
He has overlooked some strange blunders. What is the meaning of
"Laugh at your misery, as foredeeming you
An idle meteor, which drawn forth, the earth
Would soon be lost i' the air"?
We hardly need say that it should be
"An idle meteor, which, drawn forth the earth, would," &c.
"_For_wardness" for "_fro_wardness," (Vol. II. p. 87,) "tennis-balls
struck and ban_ded_" for "ban_died_," (Ib. p. 275,) may be errors of
the press; but:
"Come, I'll love you wisely:
That's jealousy,"
has crept in by editorial oversight for "wisely, that's jealously."
So have:
"Ay, the great emperor of [_or_] the mighty Cham";
and:
"This wit [_with_] taking long journeys";
and:
"Virginius, thou dost but supply my place,
I thine: Fortune hath lift me [_thee_] to my chair,
And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar";
and:
"I'll pour my soul into my daughter's belly, [_body_,]
And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds."
We suggest that the change of an _a_ to an _r_ would make sense of
the following:--
"Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors,
to this unlawful painting-house,"
[printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly endeavors to explain by
this note on the word _compositors_:--"i.e. (conjecturally),
making up the composition of the picture"! Our readers can decide for
themselves;--the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214.
We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main, good; but we should
like to know his authority for saying that _pench_ means "the hole
in a bench by which it was taken up,"--that "descant" means
"look askant on,"--and that "I wis" is equivalent to "I surmise,
imagine," which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is
appended. On page 9, Vol. I., we read in the text,
"To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,"
and in the note, "i.e. submission." The original has _aue_, which,
if it mean _ave_, is unmeaning here. Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a
picture of the Annunciation with _ave_ written on the scroll
proceeding from the bending angel's mouth? We find the same word in
Vol. III. p. 217,--
"Whose station's built on avees and applause."
Vol. III. pp. 47-48:--
"And then rest, gentle bones; yet pray
That when by the precise you are view'd,
A supersedeas be not sued
To remove you to a place more airy,
That in your stead they may keep chary
Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses
Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses."
To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, "Than that of
burning men's bones for fuel." There is no allusion here to burning
men's bones, but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building
warehouses upon them, in digging the foundations for which the bones
would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the "Churchyard of
the Holy Trinity";--see Stow's _Survey_, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere
in the same play, Webster alludes bitterly to "begging church-land."
Vol. I. p. 73, "And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the
penthouses, like an ancient that dares not flourish at the oathtaking
of the praetor for fear of the signposts." Mr. Hazlitt's note is,
"_Ancient_ was a standard or flag; also an _ensign_, of which
Skinner says it is a corruption. What the meaning of the simile is
the present editor cannot suggest." We confess we find no difficulty.
The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear of hitting the
penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord Mayor's day dares not flourish
his standard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest the query,
whether _ancient_, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian
word _anziano_.
Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had
marked for comment, unnoticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt,
(see his Introduction to "Vittoria Coromboma,") in undertaking to
give us some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of
Bracciano, should uniformly spell it _Brachiano_. Shakspeare's
_Petruchio_ might have put him on his guard. We should be glad
also to know in what part of Italy he places _Malfi_.
Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us with no new
information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had
already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give
us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John
Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is
enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the
"Duchess" and "Vittoria" could not have been written by the same
author. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and
certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.
In leaving the subject, we cannot but express our satisfaction in
comparing with these examples of English editorship the four volumes
of Ballads recently published by Mr. Child. They are an honor to
American scholarship and fidelity. Taste, learning, and modesty, the
three graces of editorship, seem to have presided over the whole work.
We hope soon, also, to be able to chronicle another creditable
achievement in Mr. White's Shakspeare, which we look for with great
interest.
_History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to
the Present Time_. By WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D.,
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Third Edition,
with Additions. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1858.
2 vols. 8vo. pp. 566, 648.
We are heartily glad to welcome this reprint of the "History of the
Inductive Sciences," from an improved edition. From an intimate
acquaintance with the first edition, we should cordially recommend
these volumes to those who wish to take a general survey of this
department of human learning. The various subjects are, for the most
part, treated in a manner intelligible and agreeable to the
unlearned reader. As an authority, Whewell is generally trustworthy,
and as a critic usually fair. But in a work going over so much
ground it would be unreasonable to expect perfect accuracy, and
uniformly just estimates of the labors of all scientific men.
Dr. Whewell's scientific philosophy naturally affects his ability as
an historian and critic. In his Bridgewater Treatise, he indulged in
a fling at mathematics, for which we have never wholly forgiven him;
and in the present volume we see repeated evidence of his
underestimate of the value of the sciences of Space and Time. He says,
Vol. I. p. 600, that it was an "erroneous assumption" in Plato to
hold mathematical truths as "Realities more real than the Phenomena."
But to us it seems impossible to understand any work of Nature aright,
except by taking this view of Plato. The study of natural science is
deserving of the contempt which Samuel Johnson bestowed upon it, if
it be not a study of the thoughts of the Divine Mind. And as
phenomena are subject to laws of space and time as their essential
condition, they are primarily a revelation of the mathematical
thoughts of the Creator. Those mathematical ideas are, in Erigena's
phrase, the created creators of all that can appear.