attention in the opposite direction. He had beaten Spain and Prussia
and Austria. Almost all Europe either belonged to him or had to do
what he said. Then he attacked Russia. It was a great mistake he made,
for Russia was far off, and it was wintertime and very cold. Still, he
managed to reach Moscow way off in the center of Russia with his army.
But the Russians burned the city and destroyed all the food, so that
Napoleon had nothing with which to feed his army. It was terribly cold;
there were deep snows; and, in retreating, his army suffered enormous
losses. Napoleon himself soon made a bee-line to Paris leaving his army
to get back the best way they could. Men and horses died of cold and
hunger by the thousands. Napoleon reached Paris, but his fortune had
turned. All of Europe was getting ready to put an end to the tyrant,
and it was not long after this that he was hemmed in and beaten by his
enemies.
When Napoleon saw that he was beaten, he signed a paper saying that he
would give up and leave France. And so he did, sailing away to a little
island called Elba, just off the coast of Italy, not far from the
island where he was born.
[Illustration: Napoleon at St. Helena.]
But Napoleon on the island of Elba got an idea that all was not lost
and that he might return to France and get back his power again. So all
of a sudden, to the surprise of France and the rest of the world, he
landed on the coast of France. The French Government at Paris sent an
army of his old soldiers against him with orders to meet him and bring
him to Paris in an iron cage. But when his old soldiers met their old
general they went over to his side, and so with them he marched on to
Paris. The English and German armies were north of France and preparing
to fight. Napoleon quickly got together an army and went forth to meet
them. At a little town called Waterloo, Napoleon fought his last
battle, for there he was utterly beaten by an English general named
Wellington. This was the Year 1815. We still speak and probably always
will speak of any great defeat as “Waterloo.”
There is a peculiar sentence which reads backward the same as forward.
It is what Napoleon might have said after all was over. It is:
ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA
After Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo, the English took him away and
put him on a little island far off in the ocean where he could not
possibly escape. It was a lonely spot named St. Helena after the mother
of Constantine. Here he lived for six years before he died.
Napoleon was probably the greatest general that ever lived, but that
does not mean that he was the greatest man. Some say he was the worst,
for just to make himself great, he killed hundreds of thousands of
people and brought destruction and ruin to the whole of Europe wherever
he fought his battles.
This brings us up into the nineteenth century, for Napoleon died in
1821. How long ago is that?
74
From Pan and His Pipes to the Phonograph
Frogs croak;
Cats me-ow;
Dogs bark;
Sheep bleat;
Cows moo;
Lions roar;
Hyenas laugh;
But only birds and people _sing_.
All other animals simply make noises.
But people can do what birds cannot.
They can also make music out of _things_.
Have you ever made a cigar-box fiddle or a pin piano or musical glasses?
In the long-ago story-book times Apollo took a pair of cow-horns and
fastened between them seven strings made from the cow’s skin. This
was called a lyre. These strings he picked with his fingers or with
a quill, making a little tinkling sound that could hardly have been
very beautiful. Yet Apollo’s son Orpheus is said to have learned from
his father to play so beautifully on the lyre that the birds and wild
beasts and even trees and rocks gathered round to hear him.
Pan, the god of the woods, who had goat’s horns and ears and legs and
feet, tied together several whistles of different lengths and played on
these as you might on a mouth-organ. This instrument was called Pan’s
pipes.
The lyre and Pan’s pipes were the two earliest musical instruments.
The first was a stringed instrument; the second a wind instrument. The
long strings and long pipes made low notes; the short strings and short
pipes made high tones.
From Apollo’s lyre we get the piano with its many, many strings. Did
you ever look at the inside of a piano and see the many strings of
different lengths? They are, however, not picked as the strings of a
lyre or harp are picked, but hammered by little felt-covered blocks as
you touch the keys.
From Pan’s pipes we get the great church organ with its pipes like
giant whistles. You don’t, of course, blow the pipes with your mouth
as you do a whistle. The pipes are so big you must blow them with a
machine like a tire-pump, and you do this as you touch the keys.
We know what the instruments in olden times were like, but we don’t
know what the music that people made was really like; there were no
phonographs to bottle up the sounds and, when uncorked a thousand
years later, to pour forth the old notes once again. The music went off
into thin air and was lost.
It was not until about the Year 1000 A.D. that music could even be
written down. Before then all music was played “by ear,” for there was
no written music. A Benedictine monk named Guy, or, in Italian, Guido,
thought of a way to write down musical notes, and he named the notes
do, re, mi, fa, and so on. These were the first letters of the words of
a hymn to St. John which the monks sang like the scale.
Another Italian is sometimes called the “father of modern music.” His
name is Palestrina, and he died about 1600. He set the church service
to music, and the pope ordered all churches to follow it, but the
people didn’t like his music very much; that is, it was not what we
call “popular.”
It was not until a hundred years later--that is, about 1700--that the
first great musician lived who wrote music that was really popular,
that the people loved, and that we still love to-day.
He was a German named Handel. His father was a barber, a dentist, and
doctor, and he wanted his boy to become a great lawyer. But the only
thing the boy liked was music.
In those days there were no pianos. There was a little instrument
with strings which was played by touching keys. This was called a
clavichord. Sometimes it had legs like a table. Sometimes it had no
legs and was just laid on a table.
[Illustration: Handel is found in the attic.]
Handel, though only six years old, got hold of one of these
instruments, and, without any one finding out about it, he had it put
up in his room in the attic of his house. After every one had gone to
bed at night he would practise on this clavichord until late, when he
was supposed to be in bed. One night his family heard sounds up under
the roof. Wondering what it could be, they took a lantern, and, quietly
climbing the attic stairs, they suddenly opened the door, and there sat
little Handel in his night-clothes on a chair with his feet reaching
only half-way to the floor, playing on the clavichord.
After that Handel’s father saw it was no use trying to make his son
a lawyer. So he got teachers for him, and before long the boy amazed
the world with his playing. He went to England, lived there, became
an Englishman, and when he died the English people buried him in
Westminster Abbey, a church in which famous Englishmen were buried.
Handel “set the Bible to music.” These songs with the Bible words
to be sung by a chorus of voices were called _oratorios_, and one
of these oratorios named “The Messiah” is sung almost everywhere at
Christmas-time.
Living at the same time with Handel was another German musician named
Bach. Bach played divinely on the organ as Handel did on the clavichord
and wrote some of the finest music for the organ that ever has been
written. Strange that both Handel and Bach went blind in their old age,
but to them it was sound, not sight, that counted most. Here is another
good subject for an argument: would you rather be deaf or blind?
Almost all musical geniuses have been musical wonders when they were
still babies. They have been great musicians even before learning to
read and write.
One such genius was born just before Handel died. He was an Austrian
named Mozart.
Mozart when only four years old played the piano wonderfully. He also
wrote music--composing, it is called--for others to play.
Mozart’s father and sister played very well, so the three went on a
concert tour. Mozart, the boy wonder, played before the empress, and
everywhere he went he was treated like a prince, petted and praised and
given parties and presents.
Then he grew up and married, and ever after he had the hardest kind of
a time trying to make a living. He composed all sorts of things, plays
with music called operas, and symphonies, which are written for whole
orchestras to play; but he made so little money that when he died he
had to be buried where they put people who were too poor to have a
grave for themselves alone. People afterward thought it a shame that
such a great composer should have no monument over his grave, but then
it was too late to find where he was buried. A monument was put up, but
to this day no one knows where Mozart’s body lies.
A German named Beethoven had read the stories of the boy wonder,
Mozart, and he thought he, too, would like to have a boy wonder to play
before kings and queens. So when his son Louis was only five years old
he kept the boy practising long hours at the piano until he became
so tired that the tears ran down his cheeks. But Louis Beethoven, or
Ludwig, as he was called in German, finally came to be one of the
greatest musicians that have ever lived. He could sit at the piano and
make up the most beautiful music as he went along--improvise, as it is
called--but he was never satisfied with it when written down. Time and
time again he would scratch out and rewrite his music until it had been
rewritten often a dozen times.
But Beethoven’s hearing began to grow dull. He was worried that he
might lose it entirely--a terrible thing to happen to any one, but
to one whose hearing was his fortune nothing could be worse. And at
last he did become deaf. This loss of his hearing made Beethoven
hopelessly sad and bad-tempered, cross with everything and everybody.
Nevertheless, he didn’t give up; he kept on composing just the same,
even after he could no longer hear what he had written.
Another great and unusual German musician named Wagner lived until
1883. Though he practised all his life, he never could play very well.
But he composed the most wonderful operas that have ever been written,
and he wrote not only the music but the words, too. He took old myths
and fairy-tales and made them into plays to be sung to music. At first
some people made fun of his music, for it seemed to them so noisy and
“slam-bangy” and without tune. But people now make fun of those “some
people” who don’t like it!
I have told you in other places of painters and poets, of architects
and wise men, of kings and heroes, of wars and troubles. I have put
this story of music of all ages in one chapter which I have tucked in
here between the acts, to give you a rest for a moment from wars and
rumors of wars.
When I was a boy I never heard any great musicians play. Now you and I
can turn on the phonograph any time and hear the music of Palestrina or
Mozart, of Beethoven or Wagner, of dozens of other masters, played or
sung to us whenever we wish; the greatest musicians become our slaves.
No caliph in the “Arabian Nights” could command such service to his
pleasure!
75
The Daily Papers of 1854-1865
If you could go up into your grandfather’s attic or the attic of
somebody else’s grandfather, or would dig down into some old trunk, you
might find some of the newspapers that were printed during the years
from 1854 to 1865. Then you might actually read in these daily papers
the happenings that I am now going to tell you about. Many people still
alive have taken part in some of these events themselves or know those
who have. Under the heading, “Foreign News,” you would probably find
some of the following things told about:
ENGLISH NEWS. At this time the queen of England was named Victoria. She
was much beloved by her people because she had such a kindly nature and
Christian spirit. She was more like a mother to her people than like a
queen. She ruled for more than half a century, and the time when she
ruled is called the Victorian Age.
The English news of 1854 would tell about a war that the English were
then fighting with Russia. Russia was a long way off, and so the
English had to send their soldiers in boats through the Mediterranean
Sea to the end, then past Constantinople in to the Black Sea. There in
a little spot of land that jutted out from Russia into the Black Sea
most of the fighting was done. This little spot of land was called the
Crimea, and the war therefore was called the Crimean War. In this war
in that far-off land thousands of English soldiers died from wounds and
disease.
Now, there was living in England at the time of this war a lady named
Florence Nightingale. She was very tender-hearted and always looking
out for and taking care of those that were sick. Even as a little girl
she had played that her dolls were sick with headache or a broken leg,
and she would bandage the aching head or broken leg and pretend to
take care of her sick patient. When her dog was ill she nursed him as
carefully as if he were a human being.
Florence Nightingale heard that English soldiers were dying by the
thousands in that distant land far away from home and that there were
no nurses to take care of the wounded. So she got together a number of
ladies, and they went out to the Crimea. Before she arrived almost half
the soldiers who were wounded died--fifty soldiers out of a hundred;
after she and her nurses came, only two in a hundred died. She went
about through the camps and over the battlefields at night carrying a
lamp looking for the wounded. The soldiers called her the Lady of the
Lamp, and they all loved her.
When at last the war was over and she returned to England, the
Government voted to give her a large sum of money for what she had
done. She, however, refused the money for herself but took it to found
a home for training nurses. Nowadays trained nurses are thought almost
as necessary as doctors, and any one who is sick can call in a trained
nurse to take care of him, but at that time there were no trained
nurses and no one had ever heard of such a thing. Florence Nightingale
was the first to start trained nursing, and so she is looked upon
almost as a saint by trained nurses.
In one battle in the Crimea a company of soldiers mounted on horseback
were given by mistake an order to attack the enemy. Though they knew it
meant certain death, they never hesitated but charged, and two-thirds
of them were killed or wounded in less than half an hour. Lord
Tennyson, the English poet, has told this story in verse which you may
know. It is called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
JAPANESE NEWS. Japan is a group of islands near China. Although I have
not told you about it before, it was an old country, settled in its
ways even before Rome was founded. In Europe there have been constant
changes of kings and rulers and people and countries. But in Japan they
have had the same line of kings since before Christ.
Japan wanted no white people in her country, and, with a very few
exceptions, she had always kept them out. But in 1854, the same year
that England began the Crimean War, an American naval officer named
Commodore Perry went to Japan and made an agreement, or treaty, as
it is called, by which Japan allowed white people to come in and do
business with her people. The Japanese seemed hungry for knowledge, to
learn how to do things in the white man’s way. When Perry first went to
Japan the Japanese lived the same way they had a thousand years before.
They knew nothing of the white man’s inventions or ways of living. But
in fifty years’ time they have jumped a thousand years in civilization!
These are some of the things you might read about in those old
newspapers. Such news would probably have taken up little space;
perhaps they would have been found down at the bottom of a column if
the newspaper were American. But if the paper was printed between 1861
and 1864, the greater part of it would be about a war that was going on
in our own country at that time. This was a war between our own people,
a family quarrel, which we call the Civil War.
Two parts of our country, the North and the South, did not agree on
several matters, chief of which was the question whether the South
could own slaves. So they went to war with each other. Each side fought
for what it believed was right, and thousands upon thousands gave their
lives for what they believed. The war lasted for four years, from 1861
to 1865, before it was decided that no one could ever again own slaves
in the United States.
Some of you who read these pages had grandfathers or great-grandfathers
who fought in this war. Some of these fought for the South; some fought
for the North. Some of them may have died for the South; some of them
may have died for the North.
The President of the United States at this time was a man named Abraham
Lincoln. Lincoln was a very poor boy who had been born in a log cabin.
He had taught himself to read by the light of a blazing knot of wood
at night after his day’s work was done. As he was very poor, he had
only a few books, and these he read over and over again. One of these
books was the same “Æsop’s Fables” that you read. When Lincoln was a
young man, he became a storekeeper. One day he found that he had given
a poor woman a smaller package of tea than she had paid for, and so he
closed the store and walked many miles to her house in order to return
the change. People began to call him Honest Abe after that, for he was
always very honest and kind-hearted.
[Illustration: Lincoln visiting camp and shaking hands with the
soldiers.]
He studied hard and became a lawyer and at last was elected President
of the United States. One day while he was in a theater watching a play
he was shot and killed by one of the actors who thought Lincoln had not
done right in freeing the slaves.
Lincoln was one of our greatest Presidents. Washington started our
country; Lincoln prevented its splitting into two parts, and kept it
together as one big united land to grow into the great country it now
is.
76
Three New Postage-Stamps
We are getting pretty close to the present time, to “Now.”
Let us look backward a minute to see what had been going on in Europe
since the time of Napoleon.
After Napoleon had been sent to Elba, the French had to have another
ruler. They wanted their old kings back again. The family name of
their old kings was Bourbon. So the French thought they ought to have
a Bourbon ruler over them. Accordingly they tried out three Bourbons
one after the other, all relatives of their last king, whom they had
beheaded.
But all of them proved no good, the French people had given the Bourbon
family a good tryout, and so at last they stopped worrying with kings
and started another republic.
Now, a republic has a president instead of a king, so that the people
had to choose a president; and whom do you suppose they picked
out? Why, the nephew of Napoleon. The nephew of Napoleon was named
Louis Napoleon. He had planned and plotted again and again to make
himself king of France, but again and again he had failed. And now he
was elected president! But Louis Napoleon didn’t want to be _only_
president. He wanted to be like his uncle the great Napoleon. He
dreamed of being emperor and conquering Europe, and so it was not long
after this before he had himself made emperor, and he called himself
Napoleon III.[5]
[5] Napoleon I had a young son who might have been Napoleon II if
he had lived. The story is, that when Napoleon III was made emperor
his name was printed simply with three exclamation marks after
it--“Napoleon!!!” and this was by mistake read Napoleon III.
Napoleon III was jealous of the neighboring country of Prussia. She was
getting to be too strong, he thought. Prussia had a king at this time
named William who was very able himself, and he had an able assistant
or prime minister named Bismarck, who was looking for an excuse to
fight France. So presently a war was started between the two countries
in 1870. Napoleon soon found he had made a bad mistake in picking the
war with Prussia. Prussia was not _getting_ too strong; she was already
too strong.
Napoleon III was completely beaten by Prussia, and he with a large army
had to surrender. Then in disgrace he went to live in England.
The Prussians marched into Paris and made the French agree to pay them
a billion dollars. When some of the French towns said they couldn’t
pay, Bismarck lined up the leading citizens of the place and told them
they would be shot if they didn’t raise the money that was demanded.
So France paid, and to the wonder and amazement of everybody she paid
this immense sum in two years’ time. But the French and the French
children have never forgotten the way they were made to pay and the way
they were treated by the Prussians, and so ever since then there has
been deadly enmity between these two countries. This war was called the
Franco-Prussian War, as it was between France and Prussia.
There were a number of little countries near Prussia. They were called
German states. But though their people were related, the countries or
states were separate. As a result of this war, Prussia was able to join
all these German states together and to make for the first time one
big, strong, powerful nation called Germany, feared by other countries
on account of her great army of fighting men. William was made emperor
of all Germany and called kaiser. He was crowned in the French palace
at Versailles that Louis XIV had built.
The French thought the Germans had been able to win this war because
they had public schools in which all their children were trained, and
because of the way their soldiers were drilled. So France set to work
and started public schools everywhere in France and imitated the German
way of drilling their army so that they would be ready for them in the
next war.
Ever since then France has been a republic with a president and an
Assembly chosen by the people.
At that time Italy was not a single country as now but like Germany a
collection of small states. Some of these were independent, some were
owned by France, some were owned by Austria. The king of one of these
Italian states was Victor Emmanuel. He wanted all the Italian states
to unite and become one single country like our United States. He was
helped by his prime minister, a very able man named Cavour, and by a
rough but romantic popular hero named Garibaldi, who was called the
hero of the Red Shirt.
Garibaldi, who had been a candle-maker in New York City, was always
poor and seemed not to care for money. He was so popular that whenever
he called for soldiers to fight with him for his beloved Italy, they at
once flocked around him ready to fight to the death.
And so at last these three, Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi,
succeeded in making their country one big nation. The Italians erected
monuments to them and named streets after them. To Victor Emmanuel they
built a magnificent building on a hill in Rome overlooking the city, a
building that was intended to be more beautiful than anything built in
Athens during the time of Pericles or in Italy during the Renaissance.
If you collect postage-stamps it would be interesting for you to get,
if you can, stamps of these countries at that time, the New French
Republic, United Germany, and United Italy.
[Illustration: 1870]
77
The Age of Miracles
You may think the Age of Miracles was when Christ lived.
But if a man who lived at that time should come back to earth now he
would think _this_ the Age of Miracles.
If he heard you talk over a wire to a person a thousand miles away, he
would think you a magician.
If you showed him people moving and acting on a movie screen, he would
think you a witch.
If he heard you start a band playing by turning on a phonograph, he
would think you a devil.
If he saw you fly through the air in an airplane, he would think you a
god.
We are so used to the telephone, telegraph, and phonograph; to
steamboats, steam railroads, and trolley-cars; to electric lights,
motor-cars, moving pictures, radio, and airplanes, that it is hard to
imagine a world in which there were none of these things--absolutely
none of these things. Yet in the Year 1800 not a single one of these
inventions was known.