ROMANCE OF THE EAST.
The ordinary course of events, the humdrum monotonous tinkling of
life's daily and ever recurring necessities, is wearisome to the
soul. There is a longing for variety; the love of the marvelous craves
wherewith to slake its thirst, the imagination seeks its food, and the
beautiful, in fancy or reality, must sometimes minister its soothing
charms. Anything to escape from the physical, cumbersome part of our
nature, into the world of romance and visionary exultation. War and its
glory, its sudden vicissitudes of victory and defeat, its brilliant
arms and thundering voices excite the most thrilling emotions in the
bosoms of care-worn mortals. Love, with its gentle wooing, its kind
sympathies, and tender ministry, comes to the heart, sick of itself,
as the very balm of Gilead. Religion calls the crushed and bleeding
spirit to an unseen world, where fancy may luxuriate in realms of
ethereal anticipations, anon to become the realities of Faith, as
the soul is discharged from its mortal tenement.
It is, under any guise, a blissful attribute, this ability to soar
out of life's dullness, into scenes of imaginary hope and brightness:
to escape from the real into the unreal, whether to deeds of heroic
valor, whose charm consists in the extravagance of the excitement, or
to linger in the enchantments of a tender passion, or to listen to the
tales of others' woes or joys: all these kindle up the enthusiasm of
the soul. But is there ever any reality to what may be termed romance?
If, as some would fain have us believe, the very objects which seem
so tangible to our senses, are no realities, what then of the vagaries
of the imagination? The moment you reduce the most thrilling incident
to mere matter of fact, or divest it of the garb in which fancy ever
delights to clothe its objects, the romance loses its charm. The
more remote the scene, the more unfettered by conventionalities the
actors, the more bewitching the tale of their adventures, and the more
impossible the achievements, the better prized. Even the aid of genii
and fairies wonderfully helps on this love of the marvelous. What
was Aladdin's lamp more than any other old piece of copper ore,
until the slave of the lamp suddenly appeared. There has ever hung
over the East, a veil of mystery; it may be from the warmth of the
Oriental imagination and its own extravagant creations, or from the
seclusiveness of the women, who, as they became unfamiliar objects,
seemed to be the very Venuses and Peris of the world of fable. The
reserve of the men themselves, leaving their better halves to an
obliviousness from all the world, is calculated to excite the curiosity
of the community at home, and the rest of the world abroad, and to
invest the fair sex with most improbable charms. The difficulty
and imminent danger of a single interview, excites the love of
adventure. Tottering old crones, themselves the genuine antidotes to
all passion, point with their bony fingers to the penetralia, where a
goddess in human form enshrines her charms. Even a transformation takes
place, a new complexion is produced, feminine draperies and a basket
of wares, and you pass the unsuspecting and smooth-faced guardian of
the portal. You love to linger in the sweetly perfumed halls, to toy
with the beautiful Circassian, as she listlessly lounges on her silken
couch; you love even the sense of danger, as you start at every step,
and again relax into forgetfulness of the external world. But sometimes
there is a sequel; you fly for life; your lovely companion bares her
neck to the bow-string, her beautiful form enters the mystic veil of
the lost woman; the coarse and heavy sack, her coffin--her grave the
blue and briny wave of the ocean stream.
All this is wild, romantic, thrilling, and tragic. But how rare the
occurrence; and of the multitude of adventure-loving, romance-seeking
beings that people earth's surface, to whose lot shall we assign
the realization? All dream; but how few wake to the vision in life's
action. All fancy; but when does not the broad sunshine of earth's
glare dispel the wreathed and mistlike draperies of imagination. The
ideal has an existence only in the "mind's eye."
There is, then, no more romance in the East than elsewhere; indeed
there is even more of natural life divested of all extravagance
of fiction. The very lack of education, which, in some respects,
is certainly to be lamented, tends to fasten their hearts together,
in the bonds of nature's best affections. Home has joys enough for
their simple souls; so entirely devoid of that refined selfishness,
which in other lands seems to annihilate those sweet provisions
for kindred sympathies, which arise from the reciprocal affinities
of parent and child, brother and sister. There is little food then
for morbid imaginations, but much for natural pleasures and simple
tastes. The very externals of Orientalism are making their exit
from the world's scene; soon there will not exist even the illusion
of characteristic and graceful forms. Ere long we shall realize,
that, divested of form and coloring, of tinsel and decoration, the
descendants of the great common ancestor of the human race, are all
alike in feature, nature, and spirit.
Indeed a general acquaintance with the different tribes and nations
under heaven only serves to convince the cosmogonist, that all are
of one family, have a common nature or origin, are but human, and
liable to human frailties and passions. The most powerful emotions
are felt in the bosoms of the savage and the polite. Ambition, love,
hatred, revenge, and a like train of absorbing impulses, rule and sway
wherever man has planted his footsteps. But how interesting to mark
the influence of circumstances, to define the latitudes and longitudes
of ideas and actions, to measure the rise and fall of the thermometer
of life, according to the various climes on earth's broad surface,
to feel the pulse of the dissenting creeds and dogmas, in a word,
to observe the same faculties under such varied culture.
In comparing the different grades of education and civilization,
it is curious to observe how often an innate refinement of feeling
equals, if not supersedes, the greatest efforts of cultivation, or the
brightest results of philosophy. A lifetime spent in the schools often
leaves the man far behind one, whose early years have passed in shrewd
observation, and practical experience, for while the one is reasoning,
abstracting, ruminating, the other experiments, and lo! he enters the
very penetralia of the temple of wisdom. And where do we find the most
susceptible hearts, the most poetical fancies, the purest aspirations
of nature? Not among the dry and tutored reasoners of civilization,
but where the mind of man has been untrammeled by rules and etiquettes,
forms and ceremonies.