remarkable statements, to prove the superiority of the ancients in many
things. "In every matter," he said, "that relates to invention--to use,
or beauty, or form--we are borrowers. You may glance around the
furniture of the palaces of Europe, and you may gather all these
utensils of art or use, and when you have fixed the shape and forms in
your mind, I will take you into the Museum of Naples, which gathers all
remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a
single one of these modern forms of art, or beauty, or use, that was not
anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of
beauty to the antique.... I had heard that nothing had been observed in
ancient times which could be called by the name of glass; that there had
been merely attempts to imitate it. In Pompeii, a dozen miles south of
Naples, which was covered with ashes eighteen hundred years ago, they
broke into a room full of glass; there was ground glass, window glass,
cut glass, and colored glass of every variety. It was undoubtedly a
glass-makers factory.... Their imitations of gems deceived not only the
lay people, but the connoisseurs were also cheated. Some of these
imitations in later years have been discovered. The celebrated vase of
the Geneva cathedral was considered a solid emerald. The Roman Catholic
legend of it was that it was one of the treasures that the Queen of
Sheba gave to Solomon, and that it was the identical cup out of which
the Saviour ate the Last Supper. Columbus must have admired it. It was
venerable in his day; it was death at that time for anybody to touch it
but a Catholic priest. And when Napoleon besieged Genoa it was offered
by the Jews to loan the senate three millions of dollars on that single
article as security. Napoleon took it and carried it to France, and gave
it to the Institute. In a fool's night, somewhat reluctantly, the
scholars said, 'It is not a stone; we hardly know what it is.' Cicero
said he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as large as the New
Testament, written on skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass
of a nut-shell. Now this is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. You have
seen the Declaration of Independence in the compass of a quarter of a
dollar, written with the aid of glasses. I have a paper at home as long
as half my hand, on which was photographed the whole contents of a
London newspaper. It was put under a dove's wing and sent into Paris,
where they enlarged it and read the news. That copy of the Iliad must
have been made by some such process.... You may visit Dr. Abbott's
Museum, where you will see the ring of Cheops. Bunsen puts him at five
hundred years before Christ. The signet of the ring is about the size of
a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of
glasses. No man was ever shown into the cabinet of gems in Italy without
being furnished with a microscope to look at them. It would be idle for
him to look at them without one. He couldn't appreciate the delicate
lines and the expression of the faces. If you go to Parma, they will
show you a gem once worn on the finger of Michel Angelo, of which the
engraving is two thousand years old, on which there are the figures of
seven women. You must have the aid of a glass in order to distinguish
the forms at all. I have a friend who has a ring, perhaps three quarters
of an inch in diameter, and on it is the naked figure of the god
Hercules. By the aid of glasses you can distinguish the interlacing
muscles, and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. Layard says he
would be unable to read the engravings on Nineveh without strong
spectacles, they are so extremely small. Rawlinson brought home a stone
about twenty inches long and ten inches wide, containing an entire
treatise on mathematics. It would be perfectly illegible without
glasses. Now, if we are unable to read it without the aid of glasses,
you may suppose the man who engraved it had pretty good spectacles. So
the microscope, instead of dating from our time, finds its brothers in
the Books of Moses--and these are infant brothers." Speaking of colors,
he said, "The burned city of Pompeii was a city of stucco. All the
houses are stucco outside, and it is stained with Tyrian purple--the
royal color of antiquity. But you can never rely on the name of a color
after a thousand years, so the Tyrian purple is almost a red. This is a
city of all red. It had been buried seventeen hundred years, and, if you
take a shovel now and clear away the ashes, this color flames up upon
you a great deal richer than anything we can produce. You can go down
into the narrow vault which Nero built him as a retreat from the great
heat, and you will find the walls painted all over with fanciful designs
in arabesque, which have been buried beneath the earth fifteen hundred
years; but when the peasants light it up with their torches, the colors
flash out before you as fresh as they were in the days of St. Paul.
Page, the artist, spent twelve years in Venice, studying Titian's method
of mixing his colors, and he thinks he has got it. Yet come down from
Titian, whose colors are wonderfully and perfectly fresh, to Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and, although his colors are not yet a hundred years old, they
are fading; the color on his lips is dying out, and the cheeks are
losing their tints. He did not know how to mix well. And his mastery of
color is as yet unequaled.... The French have a theory that there is a
certain delicate shade of blue that Europeans cannot see. In one of his
lectures to his students, Ruskin opened his Catholic mass-book and
said, 'Gentlemen, we are the best chemists in the world. No Englishman
ever could doubt that. But we cannot make such a scarlet as that, and
even if we could, it would not last for twenty years. Yet this is five
hundred years old.' The Frenchman says, 'I am the best dyer in Europe;
nobody can equal me, and nobody can surpass Lyons.' Yet in Cashmere,
where the girls make shawls worth thirty thousand dollars, they will
show him three hundred distinct colors which he not only cannot make but
cannot even distinguish.... Mr. Colton, of the Boston Journal, the first
week he landed in Asia, found that his chronometer was out of order from
the steel of the works having become rusted. The London Medical and
Surgical Journal advises surgeons not to venture to carry any lancets to
Calcutta; to have them gilded, because English steel could not bear the
atmosphere of India. Yet the Damascus blades of the Crusades were not
gilded, and they are as perfect as they were eight centuries ago.... If
a London chronometer-maker wants the best steel to use in his
chronometer, he does not send to Sheffield, the centre of all science,
but to the Punjaub, the empire of the five rivers, where there is no
science at all.... Scott, in his Crusaders, describes a meeting between
Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin. Saladin asks Richard to show him
the wonderful strength for which he is famous, and the Norman monarch
responds by severing a bar of iron which lies on the floor of the tent.
Saladin says, 'I cannot do that;' but he takes an eider-down pillow from
the sofa, and drawing his keen blade across it, it falls in two pieces.
Richard says, 'This is the black art; it is magic; it is the devil; you
cannot cut that which has no resistance;' and Saladin, to show him that
such is not the case, takes a scarf from his shoulders, which is so
light that it almost floats in the air, and, tossing it up, severs it
before it can descend. George Thompson saw a man in Calcutta throw a
handful of floss silk into the air, and a Hindoo sever it into pieces
with his sabre.... Mr. Batterson, of Hartford, walking with Brunel, the
architect of the Thames Tunnel, in Egypt, asked him what he thought of
the mechanical power of the Egyptians, and he said, 'There is Pompey's
Pillar; it is one hundred feet high, and the capital weighs two thousand
pounds. It is something of a feat to hang two thousand pounds at that
height in the air, and the few men that can do it would better discuss
Egyptian mechanics.'... We have only just begun to understand
ventilation properly for our houses, yet late experiments at the
pyramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the
most perfect and scientific manner. Again, cement is modern, for the
ancients dressed and jointed their stones so closely that in buildings
thousands of years old the thin blade of a penknife cannot be forced
between them. The railroad dates back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that
they had a knowledge of steam. Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea
of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville
says there was no social question that was not discussed to rags in
Egypt."
Humboldt, in his Cosmos, states that the Chinese had magnetic carriages
with which to guide themselves across the great plains of Tartary, one
thousand years before our era, on the principle of the compass. The
Romans used movable types to mark their pottery and indorse their books.
Layard found in Nineveh a magnifying lens of rock crystal, which Sir
David Brewster considers a true optical lens, and the origin of the
microscope. Experiments foreshadowing photography, giving remarkable
results, began to be made more than three centuries ago, and more than
two and a half centuries before Daguerre. The principle of the
stereoscope, invented by Professor Wheatstone, was known to Euclid,
described by Galen fifteen hundred years ago, and more fully long
afterward in the works of Giambattista Porta. The Thames Tunnel,
thought such a novelty, was anticipated by that under the Euphrates at
Babylon.
"It is usually attributed to Aristotle, indeed, as his peculiar glory,"
says an authority on mental philosophy, "that he should at once have
originated, and brought to perfection, a science which, for more than
two thousand years, has received few alterations, found few minds
capable of suggesting improvements. Recent labors of Orientalists have,
however, brought to light the fact that in India, long before the palmy
days of Grecian philosophy, logic was pursued with vigor as a study and
science. The Nyaya of Gotama holds, in the Indian systems of philosophy,
much the same place the Organon of Aristotle holds with us. The two,
however, are quite independent of each other. Aristotle was no disciple
of Gotama."
The so-called modern manifestations of spiritualism, as table-turning
and direct spirit-writing, have been practiced in China from time
immemorial; they have been known there at least from the days of
Lao-tse, and he was an aged man when Confucius was a youth, between five
and six centuries before the Christian era. Those who have read the
travels in Thibet of the two Lazarite monks, Huc and Gabet, will recall
many illustrations of spiritualism from their pages; and here, too, as
in China, these practices date from a very remote time. M. Tscherpanoff
published, in 1858, at St. Petersburg, the results of his investigations
with the Lamas of Thibet. He attests (having been a witness in one or
two cases) "that the Lamas, when applied to for the recovery of stolen
or hidden things, take a little table, put one hand on it, and after
nearly half an hour the table is lifted up by an invisible power, and is
(with the hand of the Lama always on it) carried to the place where the
thing in question is to be found, whether in or out of doors, where it
drops, generally indicating exactly the spot where the article is to be
found." Mesmerism is not new. Amongst Egyptian sculptures are people in
the various attitudes which mesmerism in modern times induces. The
Hebrews knew something of this science, for Baalam manifestly consulted
a clairvoyant--a man in a "trance with his eyes open." The Greeks also
had a knowledge of it. In Taylor's Plato it is said a man appeared
before Aristotle in the Lyceum, who could read on one side of a brazen
shield what was written on the other. The Romans were not ignorant of
it, for Plautus, in one of his plays, asks, "What, and although I were
by my continual slow touch to make him as if asleep?"
As to social science, here is the germ of Fourierism, in the Confessions
of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, fifteen hundred years before Fourier:
"And many of us friends, conferring about and detesting the turbulent
turmoil of human life, had debated and now almost resolved on living
apart from business and the bustle of men; and this was to be thus
obtained: we were to bring whatever we might severally possess, and make
one household of all; so that through the truth of our friendship
nothing should belong especially to any, but the whole, thus derived
from all, should as a whole belong to each, and all to all. We thought
there might be some ten persons in this society; some of us very rich,
especially Romanianus, our townsman, from childhood a very familiar
friend of mine, whom the grievous perplexities of his affairs had
brought up to court. He was the most earnest for this project; and his
voice was of great weight, because his ample estate far exceeded any of
the rest. We had settled, also, that two annual officers, as it were,
should provide all things necessary, the rest being undisturbed. But
when we began to consider whether the wives, which some of us already
had, and others hoped to have, would allow this, all that plan, which
was being so well moulded, fell to pieces in our hands, and was utterly
dashed and cast aside. Thence we betook us to sighs and groans, and to
follow the broad and beaten ways of the world."
In this beautiful passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden, of Saadi,
written more than seven centuries ago, will be found an incomparable
recipe for a famous hot-weather drink, much affected by Americans.
Heliogabalus would have given a slice of his empire for that one
immortal cobbler. "I recollect," says the poet, "that in my youth, as I
was passing through a street, I cast my eyes on a beautiful girl. It was
in the autumn, when the heat dried up all moisture from the mouth, and
the sultry wind made the marrow boil in the bones; so that, being unable
to support the sun's powerful beams, I was obliged to take shelter under
the shade of a wall in hopes that some one would relieve me from the
distressing heat of summer, and quench my thirst with a draught of
water. Suddenly from the shade of the portico of a house I beheld a
female form, whose beauty it is impossible for the tongue of eloquence
to describe; insomuch that it seemed as if the dawn was rising in the
obscurity of night, or as if the water of immortality was issuing from
the land of darkness. She held in her hand a cup of snow-water, into
which she sprinkled sugar, and mixed it with the juice of the grape. I
know not whether what I perceived was the fragrance of rose-water, or
that she had infused into it a few drops from the blossom of her cheek.
In short, I received the cup from her beauteous hand, and drinking the
contents, found myself restored to new life. The thirst of my heart is
not such that it can be allayed with a drop of pure water; the streams
of whole rivers would not satisfy it. How happy is that fortunate person
whose eyes every morning may behold such a countenance. He who is
intoxicated with wine will be sober again in the course of the night;
but he who is intoxicated by the cup-bearer will not recover his senses
until the day of judgment."
Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal brotherhood as distinctly as
it was afterward maintained by the Christian Church. "Men were born," he
says, "for the sake of men, that each should assist the others....
Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he
may be, for this very reason, that he is a man.... Nature has inclined
us to love men, and this is the foundation of the law." Marcus Aurelius
crystallized the "idea" of free government in one remarkable passage:
"The idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity
administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech,
and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the
freedom of the governed." And here is the idea of forgiveness of
injuries, by Epictetus: "Every man has two handles, one of which will
bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay
not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee: for by this
handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of
it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take
hold of it by what will bear handling." Here, too, is the idea of the
Golden Rule, by Confucius, five hundred years before our era: "To have
enough empire over one's self, in order to judge of others by comparison
with ourselves, and to act toward them as we would wish that one should
act toward us--that is what we can call the doctrine of humanity. There
is nothing beyond it." And this is the prayer claimed to have been in
use by religious Jews for nearly four thousand years, found by our Lord,
improved by Him, and adopted for the use of Christians in all time: "Our
Father who art in Heaven, be gracious unto us! O Lord our God, hallowed
be thy name, and let the remembrance of Thee be glorified in heaven
above and in the earth here below! Let thy kingdom rule over us now and
forever! Remit and forgive unto all men whatever they have done against
me! And lead us not into the power (hands) of temptation, but deliver us
from the evil. For thine is the kingdom, and thou shalt reign in glory
forever and ever more." Now hear the saying of King Solomon--wiser than
Confucius, or Cicero, or Marcus Aurelius, or Epictetus, or any rabbi:
"The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new
thing under the sun."
VII.
INCONGRUITY.
"How contradictory it seems," remarked Washington Irving, writing of
Oliver Goldsmith, "that one of the most delightful pictures of home and
homefelt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most
amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the
married state should be drawn by a bachelor who had been severed from
domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender,
touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should
have been made by a man whose deficiencies in all the graces of person
and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex."
Byron thought it contradictory that the ancients, in their mythology,
should have represented Wisdom by a woman, and Love by a boy. "Don't you
know," urged Sydney Smith, "as the French say, there are three
sexes--men, women, and clergymen?" In the old church at Hatfield, in
England, amongst the antiquities, there is a recumbent statue, which
every one believed was a woman, till Flaxman, the sculptor, examined it,
and satisfied himself that it was a priest. Madame De Stael's Delphine
was thought to contain a representation of Talleyrand in the character
of an old woman. On her pressing for his opinion of that work, he said,
"That is the work--is it not?--in which you and I are exhibited in the
disguise of females?" Bulwer seemed to Harriet Martineau "a woman of
genius, inclosed by misadventure in a man's form." A lady, speaking of
the works of the poet Thomson, observed that she could gather from his
writings three parts of his character: that he was an ardent lover, a
great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent. Savage, to whom the remark was
addressed, assured her that, in regard to the first, she was altogether
mistaken; for the second, his friend was perhaps never in cold water in
his life; and as to the third, he indulged in every luxury that came
within his reach. Holmes states, in the preface to Elsie Venner, that
while the story was in progress, he received the most startling
confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like
that he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception. Mrs. Hawthorne said
that men who had committed great crimes, or whose memories held tragic
secrets, would sometimes write to her husband, or even come great
distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the
publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as the
father confessor for all hidden sins. The Swedenborgians informed Poe
that they had discovered all that he said in a magazine article,
entitled Mesmeric Revelations, to be absolutely true, although at first
they were very strongly inclined to doubt his veracity,--a thing which,
in that particular instance, he never dreamed of not doubting himself.
Lord Lansdowne and Sydney Smith, with a companion or two, went incognito
to Deville, the phrenologist in the Strand, to have their characters
read from their skulls, and were most perversely interpreted. Lord
Lansdowne was pronounced to be so absorbed in generalization as to fail
in all practical matters, and Sydney Smith to be a great
naturalist--"never so happy as when arranging his birds and fishes."
"Sir," said the divine, with a stare of comical stupidity, "I don't know
a fish from a bird;" and the chancellor of the exchequer was conscious
that "all the fiddle-faddle of the cabinet" was committed to him on
account of his love of what he called practical business. Crabb
Robinson, on one of his visits to the British Gallery, where a
collection of English portraits was exhibited, was displeased to see the
name of the hated Jeffreys put to a "dignified and sweet countenance,
that might have conferred new grace on some delightful character."
Consistently enough with the delineation of the portrait, Evelyn
recorded in his Memoirs that he "saw the Chief Justice Jeffreys in a
large company the night before, and that he thought he laughed, drank,
and danced too much for a man who had that day condemned Algernon Sidney
to the block." An eminent gentleman who inspected the portraits of
Luther and Melancthon, as they appear on their monuments in Wittenberg,
describes the countenance of the latter as "acute and sarcastic." "Had
subtlety and craft been his qualities, I should have thought the
portrait expressed them." It is related of one of the philanthropists of
France, who at one time held no insignificant place in the government,
that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her
husband's life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his
favorite spaniel's tail, he exclaimed, "Good heavens, madame, have you,
then, no humanity?" In the palace Doria, said Willis, there is a
portrait of "a celebrated widow" (so called in the catalogue) by
Vandyck,--a "had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, with hands
wonderfully painted." The custodian told the visitor that it was "a
portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her
excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture
until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a
flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the widow." Lavater,
in his Physiognomy, says that Lord Anson, from his countenance, must
have been a very wise man. Horace Walpole, who knew Lord Anson well,
said he was the most stupid man he ever knew. Until a few years ago, it
is stated, a portrait at Holland House was prescriptively reverenced as
a speaking likeness of Addison, and a bust was designed after it by a
distinguished sculptor. It turns out to be the copy of a portrait of a
quite different person from the "great Mr. Addison."