_Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers._ By SAMUEL SMILES,
Author of "Self-Help," "Brief Biographies," and "Life of George
Stephenson." Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
The history of iron is the history of civilization. The rough, shapeless
ore that lies hidden in the earth folds in its unlovely bosom such fate
and fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle
of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising
from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and
huge of limb, bends slowly his brawny neck to the yoke of man, and at
his bidding becomes a nimble servitor to do his will. Subtile as
thought, rejoicing in power, no touch is too delicate for his
perception, no service too mighty for his strength. Tales of faërie,
feats of magic, pale before the simple story of his every-day labor, or
find in his deeds the facts which they but faintly shadowed forth. And
waiting upon his transformation, a tribe becomes a nation, a race of
savages rises up philosophers, artists, gentlemen.
Commerce, science, warfare have their progress and their vicissitudes;
but underneath them all, unnoted, it may be, or treated to a superficial
and perhaps supercilious glance, yet mainspring and regulator of all,
runs an iron thread, true thread of Fate, coiling around the limbs of
man, and impeding all progress, till he shall have untwisted its Gordian
knot, but bidding him forward from strength to strength with each
successive release. No romance of court or camp surpasses the romance of
the forge. A blacksmith at his anvil seems to us a respectable, but not
an eminently heroic person; yet, walking backward along the past by the
light which he strikes from the glowing metal beneath his hand, we shall
fancy ourselves to be walking in the true heroic age. Kings and warriors
have brandished their swords right royally, and such splendor has
flashed from Excalibur and Morglay that our dazzled eyes have scarcely
discerned the brawny smith who not only stood in the twilight of the
background and fashioned with skilful hand the blade which radiates such
light, but passed through all the land, changing huts into houses,
houses into homes, and transforming into a garden by his skill the
wilderness which had been rescued by the sword. Vigorous brains, clear
eyes, sturdy arms have wrought out, not without blood, victories more
potent, more permanent, more heroic, than those of the battle-field.
Such books as this under consideration give us only materials for the
great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own rhythm
and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage, rejoicing in the
fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving a sufficient income
from letting them out to his neighbors for the purpose of boring holes,
down to the true Thor's hammer, so tractable to the master's hand that
it can chip without breaking the end of an egg in a glass on the anvil,
crack a nut without touching the kernel, or strike a blow of ten tons
eighty times in a minute, we have a steady onward movement. Prejudice
builds its solid breakwaters; ignorance, inability, clumsiness, and
awkwardness raise such obstacles as they can; but the delay of a century
is but a moment. Slowly and surely the waters rise till they sweep away
all obstacles, overtop all barriers, and plunge forward again with ever
accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our glory
and of our humiliation,--a record of marvellous, inborn, God-given
genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass most beneficent
ends, but baffled, thwarted, fiercely and persistently resisted by
obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and gaining its ends, if it gain
them at all, only by address the most sagacious, courage the most
invincible, and perseverance the most untiring. Every great advance in
mechanical skill has been met by the determined hostility of men who
fancied their craft to be in danger. An invention which enabled a hand
of iron to do the work of fifty hands of flesh and blood was considered
guilty of taking the bread from the thrice fifty mouths that depended on
those hands' labor, and was not unfrequently visited with the punishment
due to such guilt. No demonstrated fruitlessness of similar fears in
the past served to allay fears for the future; no inefficiency of brute
force permanently to stay the enterprise of the mind prevented brute
force from making its futile and sometimes fatal attempts. It is no
matter that increased facility of production has been attended by an
increased demand for the product; it is no matter that ingenuity has
never been held permanently back from its carefully conned plans; there
have not been wanting men, numerous, ignorant, and ignoble enough to
collect in mobs, raze workshops, destroy machinery, chase away
inventors, and fancy, that, so employed, they have been engaged in the
work of self-protection.
It is such indirect lessons as may be learned from these and other
statements that give this book its chief value. The interesting
historical and mechanical information contained in its pages makes it
indeed well worthy of perusal; yet for that alone we should not take
especial pains to set it before the people. But its incidental teachings
ought to be taken to heart by every man, and especially every mechanic,
who has any ambition or conscience beyond the exigencies of bread and
butter. Lack of ambition is not an American fault, but it is too often
an ambition that regards irrelevant and factitious honors rather than
those to which it may legitimately and laudably aspire. A mechanic
should find in the excellence of his mechanism a greater reward and
satisfaction than in the wearing of a badge of office which any
fifth-rate lawyer or broken-down man-of-business with influential
"friends" may obtain, and whose petty duties they may discharge quite as
well as the first-rate mechanic. The mechanic who is master of his
calling need yield to none. We would not have him like the ironmongers
denounced by the old religious writer as "heathenish in their manners,
puffed up with pride, and inflated with worldly prosperity"; but we
would have him mindful of his true dignity. In the importance of the
results which he achieves, in the magnitude of the honors he may win, in
the genius he may employ and the skill he may attain, no profession or
occupation presents a more inviting field than his; but it will yield
fruits only to the good husbandman. Science and art give up their
treasures only to him who is capable of enthusiasm and devotion. He
alone who magnifies his office makes it honorable. Whether he work in
marble, canvas, or iron, the man who is content simply to follow his
occupation, and is not possessed by it, may be an artificer, but will
not be an artist, nor ever wear the laurel on his brow. He should be so
enamored of his calling as to court it for its own charms. Invention is
a capricious mistress, and does not always bestow her favors on the most
worthy. Men not a few have died in poverty, and left a golden harvest to
their successors; yet the race is often enough to the swift, and the
battle to the strong, to justify men in striving after strength and
swiftness, as well for the guerdon which they bring as for the jubilant
consciousness which they impart. And this, at least, is sure: though
merit may, by some rare mischance, be overlooked, demerit has no
opportunity whatever to gain distinction. Sleight of hand cannot long
pass muster for skill of hand. Unswerving integrity, unimpeachable
sincerity, is the lesson constantly taught by the lives of these
renowned mechanics. "The great secret," says one, "is to have the
courage to be honest,--a spirit to purchase the best material, and the
means and disposition to do justice to it in the manufacture." Another,
remonstrated with for his high charges, which were declared to be six
times more than the price his employers had before been paying for the
same articles, could safely say, "That may be, but mine are more than
six times better." A master of his profession is master of his
employers. Maudslay's works, we are told, came to be regarded as a
first-class school for mechanical engineers, the Oxford and Cambridge of
mechanics; nor can Oxford and Cambridge men be any prouder of their
connection with their colleges than distinguished engineers of their
connection with this famous school of Maudslay. With such an _esprit de
corps_ what excellence have we not a right to expect?
We cannot forbear pointing out the Aids to Humility collected in this
book from various quarters, and presented to the consideration of the
nineteenth century. Our boasted age of invention turns out, after
all, to have been only gathering up what antiquity has let
fall,--rediscovering and putting to practical account what the past
discovered, but could not, or, with miscalled dignity, would not, turn
to the uses of common life. Steam-carriages, hydraulic engines,
diving-bells, which we have regarded with so much complacency as our
peculiar property, worked their wonders in the teeming brain of an old
monk who lived six hundred years ago. Printing, stereotypes,
lithography, gunpowder, Colt's revolvers and Armstrong guns, Congreve
rockets, coal-gas and chloroform, daguerreotypes, reaping-machines, and
the electric telegraph are nothing new under the sun. Hundreds of years
ago the idea was born, but the world was too young to know its character
or prize its service, and so the poor little bantling was left to shiver
itself to death while the world stumbled on as aforetime. How many eras
of birth there may have been we do not know, but it was reserved for our
later age to receive the young stranger with open arms, and nourish his
infant limbs to manly strength. Richly are we rewarded in the precision
and power with which he performs our tasks, in the comfort with which he
enriches, the beauty with which he adorns, and the knowledge with which
he ennobles our daily life.
_The Life and Times of John Huss; or, The Bohemian Reformation of the
Fifteenth Century_. By E.H. GILLETT. 2 vols. Second Edition. Boston:
Gould & Lincoln.
The style of Mr. Gillett is clear, manly, and discriminating. If, in
respect of show, sparkle, nervous energy, verbal felicity, and
picturesqueness, it is not equal to that of our chief American
historians, yet it is not deficient in ease, grace, or vigor. He is
almost always careful, always unambitious, always in good taste. To
complain that the style is not equal to Mr. Motley's, simply on the
ground that the book is large and the subject historical, is grossly
unfair. Mr. Gillett has not been eager for a place as a writer; his
story has more merit in the thing told than in the telling. Even with
his want of German he has been thorough in the investigation of
authorities; and if he writes without enthusiasm, his judgment carries
the greater weight. As a scholar and an historian, as a man of candor
and resources, his name is an ornament to the Presbyterian ministry, of
which he is a member.
And yet the life of Huss is not adapted to produce popular effect, to
show to striking advantage the charm of elaborate style, or to lift the
hero himself into that upper light where his commonest deeds are
dazzling and fascinating. He had not the acumen, the weight, the
learning, the logical irresistibleness of Calvin; nor had he the great
human sympathies, the touch of earthiness, yet not grossness, which made
Luther so dear to his countrymen, and which have imprinted a cordial
geniality on the whole Lutheran Church. John Huss, though a man of
learning, the Rector of a great and powerful University, though a true
friend, though a man of wide sympathies, though an eloquent preacher,
and a most formidable enemy to the corruptions of the Romish Church, was
yet a colorless character in comparison with some men who have become
the objects of hero-worship. There are few of those grand bursts which
will always justify Luther's reputation, nothing of that rich poetical
vein of Luther's, finding its twofold course in music and in poetry:
Huss was comparatively dry, and unenriched by those overflowings of a
deep inner nature. He is, therefore, rather the exponent of an age than
a brilliant mark,--rather a type than a great, restless, creative power.
His life was almost too saintly to be interesting in the popular sense;
and although he does emerge above his age, yet it is not as the advocate
of an idea, as Luther was, nor of a great system, as Calvin was, nor as
a man fearless of kings and queens, as Knox was; his life, rather, was a
continued protest against sin in the high places of the Church. Though
in him there appear glimpses of a clearer doctrine than that of his age,
yet they do not come to a full expression; it is the pride of pontiffs,
the debaucheries of priests, the grasp after place and power and wealth
by those who claim to follow the meek and holy One, which provoke his
fiercest invective.
Mr. Gillett has, therefore, done a good service in subordinating the
story of John Huss to the history of his age. His work is strictly
entitled, "The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century." That
period has heretofore been almost a blank in our ecclesiastical records.
The blank is now filled. It was a period of great beginnings. Germany
was silent then; but Wycliffe in England, and Huss, with his
predecessors, Waldhauser, Milicz, and Peter of Dresden, in Bohemia,
were even then causing the Papal power, rent as it was with its internal
dissensions, to tremble as before approaching death.
The story of that impotent rage which sought to purchase life and safety
for the Romish Church by the murder of Huss and of Jerome of Prague is
instructive, if it is not pleasing. The truth was too true to be spoken.
Never has the Church of Rome, in its inquisitorial madness, been so
blinded with fury and passion as then. Weakened by internal feuds, with
two Popes struggling and hurling anathemas at each other, and with a
priesthood at its lowest point, not of ignorance, but of carnality, it
seemed in peril of utter extinction. Its own boldest and ablest men were
among its most outspoken accusers; and no words stronger or more cutting
were spoken by Huss than by Gerson and Clémangis. But Huss committed the
common mistake of reformers. He put himself outside of the body to be
reformed. He allowed his spirit to fret against the evils of his times
so madly that he would fain have put himself outside of the
circumstances of his age. This wiser men than he, men no loss ardent,
but more calculating, never would do. In the city of Constance itself,
during the sittings of the great Council which condemned Huss to death,
sermons were preached more bitterly reproachful of the pride of the
Pontiffs and the corruption of the Church than the words of any of the
men who put themselves beyond its pale, and addressed it as "your
Church," instead of speaking of it as "ours." And while the dignitaries
of that corrupt body dared not lay a finger upon their more pure,
prophetic, and sharply accusing brethren, they made men like Huss and
Jerome of Prague the doubly burdened and tortured victims of their rage.
Much of the interest of these volumes is owing to the prominence given
to Wycliffe, and his contemporaneous work in England. It is strange,
indeed, that in those early days, before Europe was crossed with its
net-works, not of railways, but of post-roads even, the land which
inclosed the fountains that fed the Elbe, eight hundred miles above
Hamburg, was closely bound to that distant island, four hundred miles
beyond Hamburg, on the western side of the German Ocean. But a royal
marriage in England had united that kingdom to Bohemia, and Wycliffe's
name was a household word in the lecture-rooms of Prague, and Wycliffe's
books were well worn in its libraries. The great work of preparation,
the preliminary stirring-up of men's minds, by both of these great
reformers, is hardly realized by us. But words had been spoken which
could not die in a hundred years, and the public temper had been thrown
into a glow which could not cool in a century. The "Morning Star of the
Reformation" found its twin lighting up the dark ravines of Bohemia, and
when they twain arose the day had begun to break. The Reformation did
not begin with Luther. The elements had been made plastic to his touch;
all was ready for his skilful hand to mould them into the symmetry of
the Great Reformation. The armies of the Lord had enlisted man by man
before he came; it was for his clarion blast to marshal them in
companies and battalions, and lead them to the battle. We must again
thank Mr. Gillett for his timely, serviceable book. It is never
unprofitable to look back and see who have kept the sacred fire of
Christianity burning when it seemed in danger of extinguishment. And in
that fifteenth century its flames certainly burned low. Whenever the
Church is on the side of aristocratic power, whenever it is a
conservative and not a radical and progressive force in an evil age,
when the forces of Satan are in power, the men are truly worthy of
immortality who go out to meet death in behalf of Christ and the
religion of meekness and purity and universal love. Such was John Huss.
He ought never to have suffered himself to be driven from the Church,
and when he did so, he committed the unceasing mistake of reformers,
among whom Wesley and Zinzendorf stand as the two marked exceptions; but
for rectitude, zeal, and a thorough consecration to the great interests
of Christ, he merits an even more sumptuous memorial than this excellent
book.
_Sordello, Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day._ By ROBERT BROWNING.
Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
In his dedication to the new edition of "Sordello," Mr. Browning
says,--"I lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many
might--instead of what the few must--like; but, after all, I imagined
another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it."
This, on the whole, he has done; for, though a prose heading runs before
every page, with a knowing wink to the reader, the mystery is not
cleared up. As the view dissolves with every turn of a leaf, the showman
says, confidentially,--"Now you shall see how a poet's soul comes into
play,--how he succeeds a little, but fails more,--tries again, is no
better satisfied,--
"Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language: thought may take perception's place,
But hardly coexist in any case,
Being its mere presentment,--of the whole
By parts, the simultaneous and the sole
By the successive and the many. Lacks
The crowd perception?"
We fear so; at any rate, the exhibition fails, because the showman
cannot furnish brains to his commentary. The man who can read "Sordello"
is little helped by these headings, and the man who cannot is soon
distracted by continual disappointment. We think he will end by reading
only the headings. And they doubtless are the best for him. Otherwise,
under the cerebral struggle to perceive how the prose interprets the
poetry, he might become the idiot that Douglas Jerrold exclaimed that
_he_ was at his first trial of "Sordello."
There has been a careful overhauling of the punctuation, with benefit to
the text. Many lines have been altered, sometimes to the comfort of the
reader; and about a hundred fresh lines have been interpolated here and
there, to the weakening, we think, of the dramatic vigor of nearly every
place that is thus handled. Many readers will, however, find this
compensated by an increased clearness of the sense. On page 131 (page
152, first edition) there is an improved manipulation of the simile of
the dwarf palm; and four lines before the last one on page 147 (page
171, first edition) lighten up the thought. So there are eight lines
placed to advantage after "Sordello, wake!" on page 152 (page 176). But,
on the whole, what Mr. Browning first imagined cannot be tampered with,
and he must generously trust the elements of his own fine genius to do
justice to his thought with all people who would not thank him to
furnish an interpreter.
One day we argued earnestly for Browning with a man who said it was
fatal to the poetry that it needed an argument, and that he did not want
to earn the quickening of his imagination by the sweat of his brow,--he
could gather the same thought and beauty in less break-neck places,--all
the profit was expended in mental gymnastics,--in short,
"The man can't stoop
To sing us out, quoth he, a mere romance;
He'd fain do better than the best, enhance
The subjects' rarity, work problems out
Therewith: now, you're a bard, a bard past doubt,
And no philosopher; why introduce
Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use
In poetry,--which still must be, to strike,
Eased upon common sense; there's nothing like
Appealing to our nature!"
Find the rest of Mr. Average's argument on page 67.
These objections to the poetry of Mr. Browning, which the dense,
involved, and metaphysical treatment of "Sordello" first suggested to
the public, are made to apply to all his subsequent writings. We concede
that "Sordello" over-refines, and that, after reading it, "who _would_
has heard Sordello's story told," but who would not and could not has
probably not heard it. The very time of the poem, which is put several
centuries back amid the scenery of the Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, as
if to make the struggle of a humane and poetic soul to grow, to become
recognized, to find a place and purpose, seem still more premature,
puzzles the reader with remote allusions, with names that belong to
obscure Italian narrative, with motives and events that require
historical analysis. The poem is impatient with those very things which
make the environment of the bard Sordello, and treats them in curt
lines. A character is jammed into a sentence, like a witch into a
snuff-box, the didactic parts grow metaphysical, and the life of
Sordello does not fuse the events of the poem into one long rhythm. He
thinks and dreams apart, and Palma's ambition for him is an aside, and
the events swing their arms and strike fiery and cruel blows with
Sordello absent. Considering Mr. Browning's intent, there is a fine
poetic success in this very fault of the poem, but it is not a plain
one, and is an after-thought of the critic. The numerous splendid pages
in "Sordello" do nothing towards making one complete impression which
cannot be evaded. Naddo, the genius-haunter, would complain, that, in
struggling out towards these aisles of beauty, he had seriously
compromised his clothing in the underbrush.
But the faults which characterize "Sordello" are not prevalent in the
subsequent writings which are loosely accused of them. They become
afterwards exceptional, they vein here and there the surface, and Mr.
Average stumbles over them and proceeds no farther. Still, Mr.
Browning's verse is not easy reading. He is economical of words to the
point of harmony; but what a hypocrite he would be, if he used more! He
brings you meaning, if you bring him mind; and there is Tupper outside,
if you don't care to trouble yourself. In saying this we are not
arrogant at all, for there is a large and widening sympathy with Mr.
Browning's thought. Perhaps a whole generation of readers will fretfully
break itself upon his style, and pass away, before the mind hails with
ease his merits. But is Shakspeare's verse easy reading? Not to this
day, in spite of his level of common sense, the artlessness of his
passion, and the broad simplicity of a great imagination, that causeth
its sun to shine on the evil and the good. It was easy reading to Ben
Jonson, to Milton, and to Chapman; it took "Eliza and our James"; it had
more theatrical success than the scholarly plays of Jonson: but two or
three centuries have exhausted neither his commentators nor the subtile
parts that need a comment. A good deal of Shakspeare is read, but the
rest is caviare to the multitude. We need not comfort ourselves on the
facility with which we take his name in vain. We venture to say that the
whole of Shakspeare's thought is inwardly tasted by as many people as
enjoy the subtilty of Robert Browning. Shakspeare has broader places
over which the waters lie, sweet and warm, to tempt disporting crowds,
and places deep as human nature, upon whose brink the pleasure-seekers
peer and shudder. But if Mr. Browning had a theatrical ability equal to
his dramatic, and were content to exhibit a greater number of the
stock-figures of humanity, men would say that here again they had love
that maddened and grief that shattered, murdering ambition, humorous
weakness, and imagination that remarries man and Nature.
Mr. Browning's literary and artistic allusions prevent a ready
appreciation of his genius. "Sordello" needs a key. How many friends,
"elect chiefly for love," have spent time burrowing in encyclopædias,
manuals of history, old biographies, dictionaries of painting, and the
like, for explanations of the remote knowledge which Mr. Browning uses
as if it had been left at the door with the morning paper! On the very
first page, who is "Pentapolin, named o' the Naked Arm"? If a man had
just read Don Quixote, he might single out Pentapolin. Taurello and
Ecelin were not familiar,--nor the politics of Verona, Padua, Ferrara,
six hundred years ago. There was not a lively sympathy with Sordello
himself. Who were the "Pisan pair"? Lanzi's pages were turned up to
discover. And Greek scholars recognized the "Loxian." But any reader
might be pardoned for not at once divining that the double rillet of
minstrelsy, on page 37, was the Troubadour and the Trouvere, nor for
refusing to read pages 155 and 156 without a tolerable outfit of
information upon the historical points and personages there catalogued.
There are not a few pages that appear like a long stretch of prose
suddenly broken up and jammed in the current; some of the ends stick
out, some have gone under, the sense has grown hummocky, and the
reader's whole faculty turns to picking his way. Take, for instance,
page 95, of which we have prepared a translation, but considerately
withhold it.
But turn now to the famous marble font, sculptured afresh in those
perfect lines which begin at the middle of page 16, with the picture of
the Castle Goito and the maple-panelled room. Here the boy Sordello
comes every eve, to visit the marble standing in the midst, to watch the
mute penance of the Caryatides, who flush with the dawn of his
imagination. Read the description of his childhood, from page 25, and
the delights of his opening fancy:--
"He e'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement; so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged."
All these pages are filled with poetry; the reflective element does not
dominate severely. Bordello's youthful genius craves sympathy, and he
finds it by investing Nature with fanciful forms and attributes. He is
Apollo,--"that shall be the name." How he ransacks the world for his
youth's outfit, as he climbs the ravine in the June weather, and emerges
into the forest, which tries "old surprises on him," amid which he
lingers, deep in the stratagems of his own fancy, till
"aloft would hang
White summer-lightnings; as it sank and sprang
To measure, that whole palpitating breast
Of heaven, 't was Apollo, Nature prest
At eve to worship."
Then comes a portrait of Palma, done with Titian's brush and manner. As
we turn the leaves where favorite passages lie brilliantly athwart the
faded politics of an old story, we are tempted to try spinning its
thread again for the sake of holding up these lines, which are among the
most delicate and sumptuous that Mr. Browning ever wrote. But room is at
present dear as paper. Only turn, for instance, to pages 39-45, 72-74,
the picturesque scenes on pages 84, 85, the opening of Book IV.,
Salinguerra's portrait, like an old picture of Florence, on page 127,
and lines single and by the half-dozen everywhere.
The tragedy of "Strafford" is one of Mr. Browning's earliest
compositions. It was once placed upon the stage by Mr. Macready, but it
is no more of an acting play than all the other pieces of Mr. Browning,
and is too political to be good reading. The characters seem to be
merely reporting the condition of parties under Charles I.; this and the
struggle of the King with the Parliament are told, but are not
represented, the passions of the piece belong too exclusively to the
caucus and the council-chamber, and even the way in which the King
sacrifices Strafford does not dramatically appear. In the last act,
there is much tenderness in the contrast of Stratford's doom with the
unconsciousness of his children, and pathos in his confidence to the
last moment that the King will protect him. The dialogue is generally
too abrupt and exclamatory. Vane speaks well on page 222, and Hampden on
page 231, and there are two good scenes between Charles and Strafford,
where the King's irresolution appears against the Earl's devotedness.
The closing scene of Act IV. has the dramatic form, but it is interfused
with mere civil commotion instead of color, and the motive is a
transient one, important only to the historian. But we need not multiply
words over that one of all his compositions which Mr. Browning probably
now respects the least.
"Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" is a beautiful poem, filled with thought,
humor, and imagination. The mythical theory of Strauss was never so well
analyzed as in the tilting lines from page 353 to 361. And there is good
theology in this:--
"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed;
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him;
And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,
The light of heaven from the dark of hell,
That light would want its evidence," etc.
Naddo will doubtless tell us that this poem is not built broadly on the
human heart; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of
becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through
the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well
for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always
find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to
it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the
world to read it. It is no more difficult to read than "Paradise Lost,"
while its scenery is less conventional, and the longings of a religious
heart are taken by a bold imagination into serene and starry skies.
_A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe._ By JOHN WILLIAM
DRAPER, M.D., LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Water and the science of Physiology are both good things. But water is
one thing to drink, and another to be drowned in. In like manner,
though Physiology is a large and noble science and a yet larger symbol,
furnishing analogies to the thinker quite as often as uses to the
medical doctor, nevertheless, Physiology in the form of a deluge,
overflowing, swamping, drowning almost everything else, and leaving only
Body, the sole ark, afloat,--this is a gift which we are able to receive
with a gratitude not by any means unspeakable. And such, very nearly, is
the contribution to modern thought which the author of the above work
endeavors to make. He holds Physiology to be coextensive with Man, and
would prove the fact by including History in its laws.
In truth, however, it is a pretty thin sort of Physiology to which this
extension is to be given,--resembling water in this respect also. Our
physiological philosopher seeks to prove (in 631 octavo pages) that
there are in history five perpetually recurring epochs, answering--the
reader will please consider--to the Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Maturity,
and Old Age of the individual body. So much, therefore, as one would
know concerning Physiology in its application to the individual body, in
virtue of being aware that men pass from infancy to age, thus much does
Dr. Draper propose to teach his readers concerning the said science in
its application to History. Add now that his induction rests almost
wholly on _two_ main instances, of which one is yet incomplete! Should
one, therefore, say that his logic is somewhat precipitate, and his
"science" somewhat lacking in matter, he would appear not to prefer a
wholly groundless charge.
Were Dr. Draper simply giving a History of the Intellectual Development
of Europe, he could, of course, relate only such facts as exist; and
should it appear that this history has but two cycles, one of them
incomplete, he would be under no obligation to make more. But such is
not the case. His "history" is purely a piece of polemic. His aim is to
establish a formula for all history, past, present, and to come; and, in
this view, the paucity of instances on which his induction rests becomes
worthy of comment.
And this disproportion between induction and conclusion becomes still
more glaring, when it is observed that he expects his formula for all
history to carry an inference much larger than itself. Dr. Draper is
devoted to a materialistic philosophy, and his moving purpose is to
propagate this. He holds that Psychology must be an inference from
Physiology,--that the whole science of Man is included in a science of
his body. His two perpetual aims are, first, to absorb all physical
science in theoretical materialism,--second, to absorb all history in
physical science. And beside the ambition of his aims one must say that
his logic has an air of slenderness.
This work, then, may be described as a review of European history,
written in obedience to two primary and two secondary assumptions, as
follows:--
_Primary Assumptions_: First, that man is fully determined by his
"corporeal organization"; second, that all corporeal organizations, with
their whole variety and character, are due solely to "external
situations."
_Secondary Assumptions_: First, that physical science (under submission
to materialistic interpretations) is the only satisfactory intellectual
result in history, being the only pure product of "reason"; second, that
"reason" alone represents the adult stage of the human mind,--"faith"
being simply immature mental action, and "inquiry" belonging to a stage
of intellect still less mature,--in fact, to its mere childishness.
The position thus assigned to _inquiry_ is very significant of the
theoretic precipitancy which is one of Dr. Draper's prominent
characteristics. His mind is afflicted with that disease which
physicians call "premature digestion." Inquiry, which is the perpetual
tap-root of science, he separates wholly from science, stigmatizes it as
the mere token of intellectual childhood; and this not in the haste of
an epithet or heat of a paragraph, but as a fixed part of his scheme of
history and of mind. The reason is found in his own intellectual habits.
And the savage fury with which he plies his critical bludgeon upon Lord
Bacon is due, not so much to that great man's infirmities, nor even to
his possession of intellectual qualities which our author cannot
appreciate and must therefore disparage, as to the profound consecration
of Inquiry, which it was one grand aim of his life to make.
His assumptions made, Dr. Draper proceeds to "break" and train history
into their service, much after the old fashion of "breaking" colts.
First, he mounts the history of Greece. And now what a dust! What are
centaurs to a _savant_ on his hobby? To see him among the mythic
imaginations of the sweet old land! He goes butting and plunging through
them with the headiness of a he-goat, another monster added to those of
which antique fancy had prattled.
He has collected many facts respecting ancient thought, (for his
industry is laudable,) but the evil is that he has no real use for his
facts when obtained. Think of finding in an elaborate "History of the
Intellectual Development of Europe" no use for the "Iliad" and "Odyssey"
but that of bolstering up the proposition that there was in Greece an
age of unreasoning credulity! It is like employing Jove to turn a spit
or to set up tenpins. Everywhere, save in a single direction, and that
of secondary importance with respect to antique thought, he practises
the same enormous waste of material. Socrates is a mere block in his
way, which he treats with nothing finer than a crow-bar. Socrates had
set a higher value on ethical philosophy, derived from the consciousness
of man, than on physical science; consequently, Dr. Draper's choice must
be between treating him weakly and treating him brutally; he chooses the
latter, and plays his _rôle_ with vigor,--talks of his "lecherous
countenance," and calls him "infidel" and "hypocrite." Plato he treats
with more respect, but scarcely with more intelligence. He makes an
inventory of Plato's opinions, as a shopman might of his goods; and does
it with an air which says, "He who buys these gets cheated," while
occasionally be cannot help breaking out into an expression of
impatience. Indeed, not only Plato, but Athens itself, represents to Dr.
Draper's mind the mere raw youth, the mere ambitious immaturity of
Grecian intellect, amusing itself with "faith" because incapable of
"reason." He finds its higher and only rational stage at Alexandria, at
Syracuse, or wherever results in physical science were attained. In
Aristotle, indeed, he is able to have some complacency, since the
Stagirite is in a degree "physiological." But this pleasure is partial,
for Aristotle has the trick of eminent intelligences, and must needs
presently spread his pinions and launch forth into the great skies of
speculation; whereupon, albeit he flies low, almost touching the earth
with the tips of his wings, our physiological philosopher begins to
_pish_ and _pshaw_.
In his treatment of modern or post-Roman history, Dr. Draper goes over
new ground in much the same spirit. He seems, indeed, nearer to his
facts, deals more with actual life, is more lively, graphic, engaging,
and has not that air of an intellectual shopman making an inventory.
Considered as a general review of the history of Europe, written chiefly
in the interest of physical science, but also in marked opposition to
Roman Catholicism, it might pass unchallenged and not without praise.
But considered as a final scientific interpretation of the last fifteen
centuries, its shortcomings are simply immeasurable. The history of
Europe, from the fusion of the Christian Impulse with Roman imperialism
to the time of Columbus, Copernicus, and Luther, is the history of a
grand religious idealism _established over men's heads in the form of an
institution_, because too great to be held in solution by their
thoughts. Of such a matter the writer in question could give no other
than a very inadequate account. Wanting that which is highest in the
reason of man, namely, imaginative intellect, he has no natural fitness
for explaining such a fact; while his unconsciousness of any such
deficiency, his persuasion that an _imagination_ and a _delusion_ are
one and the same, and his extreme dogmatic momentum cause him to handle
it with all the confidence of commanding power.
Considered, again, as a polemic to the point that history revolves
forever through five recurring epochs, and that, as our civilization has
been now four centuries in the "age of reason," it must next (and
probably soon) pass into the fifth stage, that of decrepitude, and
thence into infantile credulity and imbecility once more,--as a
demonstration that history is such a Sisyphus, his induction is weak
even to flimsiness.
But on approaching times yet more modern, the dominating predilection of
the writer no longer misleads him; it guides him, on the contrary, to
the truth. For of the last four centuries the grand _affirmative_ fact
is the rise of physical science. Or rather, perhaps, one should say that
it _was_ the grand fact until some fifty years ago. Science is still
making progress; indeed, leaving out of sight one or two great Newtonian
steps, we may say that it is advancing more rapidly than ever. But now
at length its spiritual correlative begins to emerge, and a new epoch
forms itself, as we fully believe, in the history of humanity.
In celebrating this birth and growth of science, in treating it as the
central and commanding fact of modern times, and in suggesting the vast
modification of beliefs and habits of thought which this must effect,
Dr. Draper has a large theme, and he treats it _con amore_. In this
respect, his book has value, and is worth its cost to himself and his
readers. In some branches of science, moreover, as in Physiology, and in
questions of vital organization generally, he is to be named among the
authorities, and we gladly attend when he raises his voice.
Yet even in respect to this feature, his work cannot be praised without
reserve. Though a man of scientific eminence, yet in the pure and open
spirit of science it is impossible for him to write. He is a dogmatist,
a controversialist, a propagandist. No matter of what science he treats,
his exposition ever has an aim beyond itself. It is always a means to an
end; and that end is always a dogma. For example, he has written a work
on Human Physiology; and in the present volume he avows that his "main
object" therein was to "enforce the doctrine" of the "absolute dominion
of physical agents over organic forms as the fundamental principle in
all the sciences of organization." This "main object" is no less dear to
him in the work immediately under consideration. He still teaches that
the primitive cell, with which, it is supposed, all organisms begin, is
in all the same, but, being placed in different situations, is developed
here into a man, and there into a mushroom. "The offspring," he says,
not without oracular twang, "is like its parent, not because it includes
an immortal typical form, but because it is exposed in development to
the same conditions as was its parent." Behold a cheap explanation of
the mystery of life! If one inquire how the vast variety of parental
conditions was obtained, Dr. Draper is ready with his answer:--"A
suitableness of external situation called them forth," quoth he. An
explanation nebulous enough to be sage!
Behold, therefore, a whole universe of life constructed by "Situations"!
"Situations" are the new _Elohim_. They say to each other, "Let us make
man"; and they do it! But they cannot say, "Let us make man in our own
image"; for they have no image. No matter: they succeed all the same in
giving one to man! Wonderful "Situations"! Who will set up an altar to
almighty "Situations"?
We have ourselves a somewhat Benjamite tongue for pronouncing the
popular shibboleths, but, verily, we would sooner try the crookedest of
them all than endeavor to persuade ourselves that in a universe wherein
no creative idea lives and acts "external situations" can "call forth"
life and all its forms. We can understand that a divine, creative idea
may develop itself under fixed conditions, as the reproductive element
in opposite sexes may, under fixed conditions, prove its resources; but
how, in a universe devoid of any productive thought, "external
situations" can produce definite and animate forms, is, to our feeble
minds, incomprehensible. Verily, therefore, we will have nothing to do
with these new gods. The materialistic _savans_ may cry _Pagani_ at us,
if they will; but we shall surely continue to kneel at the old altars,
unless something other than the said "Situations" can be offered us in
exchange.
We complain of Dr. Draper that he does not write in the spirit of
science, but in the spirit of dogmatism. We complain of him, that, when
he ostensibly attempts a piece of pure scientific exposition, his
thought always has a squint, a boomerang obliquity; it is afflicted with
_strabismus_, and never looks where it seems to look. He approaches
history only to subject it to the service of certain pet opinions
_already formed_ before his inspection of history began. He seeks only
to make it an instrument for the propagation of these. He is a
philosophical historian in the same sense that Bossuet was a
philosophical historian. Each of these seeks to subject history to a
dogma. The dogma of Bossuet is Papal Catholicism; that of Dr. Draper is
the creative supremacy of "Situations" and "the insignificance of man in
the universe."
It is quite proper for Dr. Draper to appear as a polemic in science, if
he will. It is not advocacy _per se_ of which we complain; it is
advocacy with a squint, advocacy round a corner. If he wishes to prove
the creative efficacy of "Situations," let him do so; but let him not in
doing so seem to be offering an impartial exposition of Human
Physiology. If he wishes to prove that physical science is the only
rational thing in the world, he may try; but let him not assume to be
writing a history of intellectual development. If he would convince us
that history has epochs corresponding to those of individual life, we
will listen; but we shall listen with impatience, if it appear after all
that he is merely seeking, under cover of this proposition, to further a
low materialistic dogma, and convince us of "man's insignificance in the
universe."
We are open to all reasonings. Any decent man, who has honorably gone
through with his Pythagorean _lustrum_ of silence and thought, shall, by
our voice, have his turn on the world's tribune; and if he be honest, he
shall lose nothing by it. But we hate indirections. We hate the
pretension implied in assuming to be an authoritative expounder, when
one is only an advocate. And, still further, we shall always resist any
man's attempt to make his facts go for a great deal more than they are
worth. Let him call his ten _ten_, and it shall pass for ten; but if he
insist on calling it a thousand, we shall not acquiesce. The science of
Physiology is just out of its babyhood. Of the nervous system in
particular--of its physiology and pathology alike--our knowledge is
extremely immature. We are just beginning, indeed, to know anything
_scientifically_ on that subject. The attempt in behalf of that little
to banish spiritual philosophy out of the world, and to silence forever
the voice of Human Consciousness, is a piece of pretension on behalf of
which we decline to strain our hospitality.
Our notice of this work would, however, be both incomplete and unjust,
did we forbear to say, that, in its avowed idea, the author has got hold
of a genuine analogy. Not that we approve the details of his scheme; the
details, we verily believe, are as nearly all wrong as an able and
studious man could make them. But the general idea of a correspondence
between individual and social life, of an organic existence in
civilizations and a consequent subjection to the law of organisms, is a
rich mine, and one that will sooner or later be worked to profit. And
the definite, emphatic announcement of it in Dr. Draper's work, however
awkwardly done, suffices to make the work one of grave importance.
Every system of civilization is in some degree special. None is
universal; none represents purely the spirit of humanity; none contains
all the possibilities of society. Not being universal, none can be, in
its form, perpetual. The universal asserts its supremacy; all that is
partial must be temporary. The human spirit takes back, as it were, into
its bosom each sally of civilization before pulsing anew. Thus, even on
their ideal side, civilizations have their law of limitation; and to
know what this law of limitation definitely is constitutes now one of
the great _desiderata_ of the world. We believe, that, _ceteris
paribus_, the duration of a civilization is proportioned to its depth
and breadth,--that is, to the degree in which it represents the total
resource and possibility of the human spirit.
Again, every system of civilization has a body, an institution, an
established and outward interpretation of social relationship. In
respect to this it is mortal. In respect to this it has a law of growth
and decay. In respect to this, moreover, it is subject to what we call
accident, the chances of the world. In fine, the bodies of individuals
and of civilizations, the fixed forms, that is, in which they are
instituted, serve the same uses and obey the same law.
Now a work which should deal in a really great and profound way with
this _corpus_ of civilizations,--not spending itself in a mere tedious,
endless demonstration that such _corpus_ exists, and has therefore its
youth and its age, but really explaining its physiology and
pathology,--such a work would be no less than a benefaction to the human
race. And in such a work one of the easiest and most obvious points
would be this,--that the spirit of civilizations has a certain power of
changing the form of its body by successive partial rejections and
remouldings; and the degree in which they prove capable of this
continuous _palingenesia_ is one important measure of their depth and
determinant of their duration.
For writing such a work we do not think Dr. Draper perfectly qualified.
For this we find in him no tokens of an intelligence sufficiently
subtile, penetrating, and profound. He is, moreover, too heady and too
well cased in his materialistic strait-waistcoat. Nevertheless, his book
carries in it a certain large suggestion; it contains many excellent
observations; its tone is unexceptionable; the style is firm and clear,
though heavy and disfigured by such intolerable barbarisms as "commence
to" walk, talk, or the like,--the use of the infinitive instead of the
participle after _commence_. Dr. Draper is an able man, a scholar in
science, a well-informed, studious gentleman in other provinces; but he
tries to be a legislator in thought, and fails.
_De l'Origine du Langage_. Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l'Institut.
Quatrième Èdition, augmentée. Paris.
It seems to be the law of French thought, that it shall never be
exhaustive of any profound matter, and also that (Auguste Comte always
excepted) it shall never be exhausting to the reader. German thought may
be both; French is neither; English thought--but the English do not
think, they dogmatize. Magnificent dogmatism it may be, but dogmatism.
Exceptions of course, but these are equally exceptions to the
characteristic spirit of the nation.
M. Renan is thoroughly French. The power of coming after the great
synthetic products of the human spirit and distributing them by analysis
into special categories, eminent in his country, is pre-eminent in him.
The facility at slipping over hard points, and at coming to unity of
representation, partly by the solving force of an interior principle,
and partly by ingenious accommodations, characteristic of French
thought, characterizes his thinking in particular. That supremacy of the
critical spirit in the man which secures to it the loyalty of all the
faculties is alike peculiar to France among nations, and to this writer
among Frenchmen. In Germany the imagination dominates, or at least
contends with, the critical spirit; the French Ariel not only gives
magic service to the critical Prospero, but seeks no emancipation,
desires nothing better. Hence an admirable clearness and shapeliness in
the criticism of France. Hence, also, in its best criticism a high
degree of imaginative subtilty and penetration, without prejudice either
to the dominion of common sense in the thought or to clearness in the
statement.
M. Renan's essay on "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality.
Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,--_almost_ profound,
and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our
time,--it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held
in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease,
grace, and vigor, and in its style there is such crystal perspicuity and
precision, that one must he proof against good thinking and excellent
writing not to feel its charm.
The main propositions of the work--whose force and significance, of
course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration--are that language issues
from the spontaneity of the human spirit,--"spontaneity, which is both
divine and human"; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of
consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel
with consciousness, that is, with the developed spirit of man, in its
nature and growth; and that, by consequence, its first form is not one
of analytic simplicity, but of a high synthesis and a rich complexity.
The whole mind, he says, acts from the first, only not with the power of
defining, distinguishing, separating, which characterizes the intellect
of civilized man; his objects are groups; he grasps totalities; sees
objects _and_ their relationships as one fact; tends to connect his
whole consciousness with all he sees, making the stone a man or a god:
and language, in virtue of its perpetual parallelism with consciousness,
must be equally synthetic and complex from the start.
He finds himself opposed, therefore, first, to those, "like M. Bonald,"
who attribute language to a purely extraneous, not an interior,
revelation; secondly, to the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who
made it a product of free and reflective reason; thirdly, to the German
school, who trace it back to a few hundred monosyllabic roots, each
expressing with analytic precision some definite material object, from
which roots the whole subsequent must be derived by etymologic
spinning-out, by agglutination, and by figurative heightening of
meaning.
His work, accordingly, should be read by all sincere students of the
question of Language in connection with the statements of Professor
Müller, as he represents another and a typical aspect of the case. He
denies the existence of a "Turanian" family of tongues, such as Müller
sought to constitute in Bunsen's "Outlines"; pronouncing with great
decision, and on grounds both philosophical and linguistic, against that
notion of monosyllabic origin which assumes the Chinese as truest of all
tongues to the original form and genius of language, he is even more
decided that not the faintest trace can be found of the derivation of
all existing languages from a single primitive tongue. From general
principles, therefore, and equally from inspection of language, he
infers with confidence that each great family of languages has come
forth independently from the genius of man.
His results in Philology correspond, thus, with those of Mr. Agassiz in
Natural History. They suggest multiplicity of human origins. From this
result M. Renan does not recoil, and he takes care to state with great
precision and vigor the entire independence of the spiritual upon the
physical unity of man,--as Mr. Agassiz also did in that jewel which he
set in the head of Nott and Gliddon's toad.
But here he pauses. His results bear him no farther. The philological
and physiological classifications of mankind, he says, do not
correspond; their lines cross; nothing can be concluded from one to the
other. The question of unity or diversity of physical origins he leaves
to the naturalist; upon that he has no right to raise his voice.
Spiritual unity he asserts firmly; linguistic unity he firmly denies; on
the question of physical unity he remains modestly and candidly silent,
not finding in his peculiar studies data for a rational opinion.
M. Renan is not a Newton in his science. He satisfies, and he
disappoints. The Newtonian depth, centrality, and poise,--well, one may
still be a superior scholar and writer without these. And such he is.
His tendency to central principles is decided, but with this there is a
wavering, an unsteadiness, and you get only agility and good writing, it
may be, where you had begun to look for a final word. Sometimes, too, in
his desire of precision, he gives you precision indeed, but of a cheap
kind, which is worse than any _thoughtful_ vagueness. Thus, he opens his
sixth section by naming _l'onomatopée_, the imitation of natural sounds,
as the law of primitive language. He knew better; for he has hardly
named this "law" before he slips away from it; and his whole work was
pitched upon a much profounder key. Why must he seize upon this
ready-made word? Why could he not have taken upon himself to say
deliberately and truly, that the law of primitive language, and in the
measure of its _life_ of all language, is the symbolization of mental
impression by sounds, just as man's spirit is symbolized in his body,
and absolute spirit in the universe? But this is "vague," and M. Renan
writes in Paris.
And in Paris he has written an able and in many respects admirable
treatise,--_almost_ profound, as we have said, and creditable to him and
to France. It must be reckoned, we think, a foundation-stone in the
literature of the problem of Language.
In five or six pages the theological peculiarities of M. Renan appear.
The reader, however, who is most rigidly indisposed to open question on
such matters will find these six pages which do not please him a feeble
counterbalance to the two hundred and fifty which do.