_The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus._ Translated by
GEORGE LONG. London: Bell & Daldy.
Dulness is usually reckoned the prescriptive right of kings; at least,
they are supposed to be officially incapable of literary eminence. And
yet it is a curious fact, that, of those idiomatic works which
literature will not "let die," of those marked productions which survive
by their individuality, three, at least, bear the impress of royal
names.
Devotion has found, in the contributions of three thousand years, no
utterance so fit as the lyrics of a Hebrew king; satiety has breathed no
sigh so profound as "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King
of Jerusalem"[31]; and the wisdom of the Stoics has no worthier exponent
than the meditations of a sovereign who ruled the greatest empire known
to history, and glorified it with his own imperial spirit,--the noblest
that ever bore the burden of state.
Our third example, unlike the other two, has not been adopted by
ecclesiastical authority, and is not incorporated in any Vulgate of
sacred lore; but its place in the canon of philosophy has long been
established, and is often confirmed by fresh recognition. A new
translation of this celebrated work, of which several versions already
existed, has just been given to the English public by Mr. George Long, a
well-known scholar and critic, with the title above named. We should
have preferred the old title, "Meditations," so long endeared; but we
are none the less grateful to Mr. Long for this needful service, for
which no ordinary qualifications were required, and which has never
before been performed by such competent hands.
Gibbon has said, that, "if a man were called to fix the period in the
history of the world during which the condition of the human race was
most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which
elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." This
period comprises, together with the four concluding years of the first
century of the Christian era, four-fifths of the second. The last of
these fifths, deducting one year, (A.D. 161-180,) was occupied by the
supreme rule of Annios Verus, better known by his assumed name of Marcus
Ælius Aurelius Antoninus, fifteenth emperor of the Romans, nephew and
successor of another Antoninus, whose virtues, and especially his
grateful remembrance of his predecessor and benefactor, procured him the
_agnomen_ of "Pius." In a line of sovereigns which numbers a larger
proportion of wise and good men than most dynasties, perhaps than any
other, M. Antoninus ranks first, so far as those qualities are
concerned. A man of singular and sublime virtue, whose imperial station,
so trying to human character, but served to render more conspicuous his
rare and transcendent excellence. With an empire such as never before or
since the Augustan dynasty has fallen to the lot of an individual, lord
of the civilized earth, he lived simply and abstemiously as the poorest
citizen in his dominions, frugal with unlimited means, humble with
unlimited sway. Not a Christian by profession, in piety toward God and
charity toward man he was yet a better Christian in fact than any of the
Christian emperors who succeeded him. He governed his life by the Stoic
discipline, the most hardy, in its practical requirements, of ancient
systems, so rigorous in its ethic that Josephus is proud to claim an
affinity with it for the "straitest" of the Jewish sects, and so pure in
its spirit that St. Jerome ranks its best-known writer as a
Christian,--a philosophy which taught men to consider virtue as the only
good, vice as the only evil, all external things as indifferent. "His
life," says Gibbon, "was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno.
He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just
and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who
had excited a rebellion in Syria, had by a voluntary death deprived him
of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend. War he detested as
the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a
just defence called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his
person to eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the
severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution.
His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century
after his death there were many who preserved the image of Marcus
Antoninus among their household gods."
The learned Casaubon, after placing him above Solomon, "as being lord
and master of more great kingdoms than Solomon was of towns," speaks of
him as a man "who, for goodness and wisdom, was had by all men during
his life in such honor and reputation as never man was either before him
or after him." "There hath ever been store enough of men," he says,
"that could speak well and give good instructions, but great want of
them that could or so much as endeavored to do as they spake or taught
others to do. Be it therefore spoken to the immortal praise and
commendation of Antoninus, that as he did write so he did live. Never
did writers so conspire to give all possible testimony of goodness,
uprightness, innocence, as they have done to commend this one. They
commend him, not as the best prince only, but absolutely as the best man
and best philosopher that ever lived."
Merivale, who concludes with the reign of M. Antoninus his "History of
the Romans under the Empire," adds his testimony to that of the cloud of
witnesses who have trumpeted the great _Imperator's_ praise. "Of all the
Cæsars whose names are enshrined in the page of history, or whose
features are preserved to us in the repositories of art, one alone seems
still to haunt the Eternal City in the place and the posture most
familiar to him in life. In the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius,
which crowns the platform of the Campidoglio, Imperial Rome lives
again.... In this figure we behold an emperor, of all the line the
noblest and the dearest, such as he actually appeared; we realize in one
august exemplar the character and image of the rulers of the world. We
stand here face to face with a representative of the Scipios and Cæsars,
the heroes of Tacitus and Livy. Our other Romans are effigies of the
closet and the museum; this alone is a man of the streets, the forum,
and the capitol. Such special prominence is well reserved, amid the
wreck of ages, for him whom historians combine to honor as the worthiest
of the Roman people."
Mr. Long, in his biographical introduction, examines at length the
evidence for Marcus's alleged persecution of the Christians. Lardner,
and other writers in the Christian ecclesiastical interest, assuming the
fact, denounce it as a blot on the Emperor's fame. The translator
devotes more space to the consideration of this matter than, perhaps, in
the judgment of the historical critic at this day, it will seem to
deserve. That Christians, in the time of M. Antoninus, in Asia Minor and
in Gaul, suffered torture and death on account of their faith, admits of
no reasonable doubt. That Marcus authorized these persecutions, in any
sense implying the responsibility of an original decision, does not
appear. The imperial power, it must be remembered, was not absolute, but
constitutionally defined. The Augusti, for the most part, were but the
executors of existing laws. The punishment of Christians, who refused to
sacrifice, and persisted in contravening the religion of the State, was
one of those laws. In some places, especially at Lyons and Vienne, the
Christians were the victims of popular riots; but where they suffered by
legal authority, in the name of the imperial government, it was under
the well-known law of Trajan, a law which had been sixty years in
operation when Marcus came upon the throne. The only blame that can be
imputed to him in this relation (if blame it be) is that of failing to
discern and acknowledge the divine authority of the new religion which
was silently undermining the old Roman world. But no one who puts
himself in the Emperor's time and place will think the worse of him for
not adopting a view of this subject which educated and serious minds
were precisely the least likely to adopt. To such, Christianity
presented itself simply as a novelty opposed to religion and threatening
the State. The case of Justin may be cited as an instance of a
thoughtful and philosophic mind embracing Christianity in spite of the
strong presumption against it in minds of that class. But, not to speak
of the very wide difference between the steady, conservative Roman and
the volatile Greek, all the life-circumstances of Justin, a Palestinian
by birth, favored his adoption of the Christian faith; everything in the
life of Antoninus tended in the opposite direction. Justin embraced the
religion first on its philosophic side, where Antoninus was especially
fortified against it, having early come to an understanding with himself
on the deepest questions of the soul. His decisions on these questions
did not differ materially from those of the Gospel; they might, unknown
to himself, have been modified by a subtile atmospheric influence
derived from that source and acting on a nature so receptive of its
spirit. But the very fact, that he had in a measure anticipated the
teachings of the Gospel, precluded the chance of his being surprised
into acquiescence with the new religion by its moral beauty, if brought
fairly before him, which perhaps it never was; for it does not appear
that he read the Christian apologies framed in his day. What was best in
Christianity, as a system of doctrine,--its ethical precepts,--he had
already embraced; its substance he possessed; its external form he knew
only as opposition to institutions which he was bound by all the
sanctities of his office, by all the dignity of a Roman patrician, and
by all the currents of his life, to uphold. For the rest, the relation
of a mind like his to polytheism could be nothing more than the formal
acceptance of its symbols in the interest of piety, implying no
intellectual enslavement to its myths and traditions.
De Quincey calls attention to one merit of Antoninus, which, he says,
has been "utterly unnoticed hitherto by historians, but which will
hereafter obtain a conspicuous place in any perfect record of the steps
by which civilization has advanced and human nature been exalted. It is
this: Marcus Aurelius was the first great military leader who allowed
rights indefeasible, rights uncancelled by misfortune in the field, to
the prisoner of war. Others had been merciful and variously indulgent,
upon their own discretion, and upon a random impulse, to some, or
possibly to all of their prisoners; ... but Marcus Aurelius first
resolutely maintained that certain indestructible rights adhered to
every soldier simply as a man, which rights capture by the sword, or any
other accident of war, could do nothing to shake or diminish.... Here is
an immortal act of goodness built upon an immortal basis; for so long as
armies congregate and the sword is the arbiter of international
quarrels, so long will it deserve to be had in remembrance that the
first man who set limits to the empire of wrong, and first translated
within the jurisdiction of man's moral nature that state of war which
had heretofore been consigned by principle no less than by practice to
anarchy, animal violence, and brute force, was also the first
philosopher who sat upon a throne. In this, and in his universal spirit
of forgiveness, we cannot but acknowledge a Christian by
anticipation.... And when we view him from this distant age, as heading
that shining array, the Howards and the Wilberforces, who have since
then, in a practical sense, hearkened to the sighs of 'all prisoners and
captives,' we are ready to suppose him addressed by the great Founder of
Christianity in the words of Scripture, 'Thou art not far from the
kingdom of God.'"[32]
Born to be a thinker rather than an actor, by nature framed for the life
of a recluse, by temperament inclined to private study and
contemplation, this best of emperors and of men by Providential destiny
was doomed to spend the greater part of his days in the tumult of
affairs, and, like a true Roman, died at last a soldier's death in his
camp on the banks of the Danube, where, in after years, another line of
"Roman Emperors," the sovereigns of the "Holy Roman Empire of Germany,"
had their seat. For more than a century after his death, and so long as
Rome retained a remnant of her old vitality, a grateful people adored
him as a saint, and he who "had no bust, picture, or statue of Marcus in
his house was looked upon as a profane and irreligious man." To this
day, beside the equestrian statue named by Merivale, in the heart of
modern Rome, a few steps from her principal thronged thoroughfare, a
column which time has spared still commemorates the last of the Romans.
The Emperor's statue which once surmounted it was destroyed, and
centuries after the statue of St. Paul exalted to the vacant place, as
if to show that the "height of Rome" is not quite the perfection of all
humanity, and that even the purest of ancient philosophies is incomplete
without the supplement of a more humane and universal wisdom.
Mr. Long's preliminary dissertation on "The Philosophy of Antoninus" is
thorough and satisfactory, so far as that specific subject is concerned,
but presents a very inadequate view of the Stoic philosophy in general,
and strikes us as unjust in its incidental disparaging notice (in a
footnote) of Seneca, who, after all, will ever be regarded as the
greatest literary product of that school.
The book itself to which this essay introduces us is one of the few
monuments that remain to us, and by far the best monument that remains
to us, of the interior spiritual life of the better class of that
Græco-Roman world of whose exterior life we know so much. Not to have
read it is not to know the deepest mind of the ancients. Two things in
it are prevailingly prominent: first, a noble nature; secondly, an
extreme civilization, already faltering, turned to decline, expecting
its fall. On every page lies the shadow of impending doom; on every page
shines forth the great, heroic soul equal to every fate. The work--if
work it can be called--is entirely aphoristic, with no apparent plan; in
fact, a note-book or diary of thoughts and fancies, set down as they
occurred from time to time, and as leisure favored the record. In its
structure, or rather want of structure, and in some of its suggestions,
it reminds one of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Yet the difference between
them is immense. The prevailing tone of Ecclesiastes is skepticism, that
of the "Thoughts" is faith. The one is morbid, the other sane; the one
relaxes, the other braces; the one is steeped in despondency and gloom,
the other is redolent of manly courage and cheerful trust. The Emperor,
like the Preacher, has much to say about death; but he views the subject
from a higher plane, and envisages the final event with a better hope.
He does not think that a living dog is better than a dead lion.
"What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only
one, philosophy.[33] But this consists in keeping the dæmon within a man
free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing
nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy,... and
besides accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming
from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came, and finally
waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a
dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded.
But if there is no harm to the elements themselves, in each continually
changing into the other, why should a man have any apprehension about
the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to
Nature, and nothing is evil which is according to Nature."[34]
"Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore;
get out. If, indeed, to another life, there is no want of gods, not even
there. But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held
by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel which is as much
inferior as that which serves it is superior; for the one is
intelligence and deity, the other is earth and corruption."[35]
"Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state [the world]; what
difference does it make to thee whether for five years or three? for
that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the
hardship, then, if no tyrant or unjust judge sends thee away from the
state, but Nature who brought thee into it? The same as if a prætor who
has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage. 'But I have not
finished the five acts,--only three of them.' Thou sayest well; but in
life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete
drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition,
and now of its dissolution; but thou art the cause of neither. Depart,
then, satisfied, for he who dismisses thee is satisfied."[36]
The book is one which scarcely admits of analysis, and of which it is
impossible to convey an idea by any discussion of its contents. In
characterizing the man we have characterized the "Thoughts" as the
commentary of personal experience on the virtues of fortitude, patience,
piety, love, and trust. They have a history, and have been the chosen
companion of many and very different men of note. Our own native Stoic,
the latest, and, since Fichte, the best representative of that school,
fed his youth at this fountain, and shows, in his earlier writings
especially, the influence of his imperial predecessor. Mr. Long reminds
us that this was one of the two books which Captain John Smith, the hero
of young Virginia, selected for his daily use. Unlike the generality of
John Smiths and of modern Virginians, the brave soldier found here a
kindred spirit.
The Christian world possesses in its Bible a record of Semitic piety
whose genuine utterances will never be surpassed; but when the Vulgate
of the Aryan races shall be published, these confessions of a noble soul
will claim a prominent place among its scriptures.
_Levana; or, The Doctrine of Education._ Translated from the German of
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
We call to mind certain phrases wherein the critic may honestly express
satisfaction that a portion of the world's plastic stock of useful
knowledge has been skilfully manipulated into a volume. Truly, none of
them will do for this sweetest household blossom of a commanding
intellect. We have poetry too discursively brilliant for the trammels of
verse, eloquence which has drawn its materials from the purest sources,
and instructiveness running into sparkling effusions or soaring in
aërial fancies. It is hard to speak adequately of this delicious,
accidental "Levana." It is no schoolmaster's manual, no elaborated
system set to snap like a spring-trap upon the heads of incautious
meddlers,--it is only the very aroma of the married life of a wise and
tender poet.
Those early years which held Richter in the grasp of their miseries and
perplexities had passed away. Bravely had he struggled through
temptations which at all times and in all places beset young men, added
to such as are peculiar to one of the highest inspirations steeped to
the lips in poverty. Through all perils he had borne the purity of his
youth, the freedom and simplicity of his deep soul. And so he is
privileged to bring to marriage and the delicate nurture of children the
fine insights of a man of genius who has been wholly true to the costly
gift he possessed. Of the domestic fragrance of a well-ordered family no
savor eludes him. The wife and children, the vigorous and rich life
which they offer to a good man,--those are touched with keenest analysis
and in festal spirit. Most thoroughly does the author possess that rare
combination of mind which seeks speculative truth no less than ideal
beauty; with him emotion is nothing, unless it leads to principle.
"Levana," as we have said, is no iron system for the education of
children; it is rather a most readable text-book for the education of
parents. It sustains a relation of spiritual fathership to common
fathers, and offers choicest counsel to those who would assume the
office of family-teacher honestly and in the fear of God. And it seems
to us that of these subtle influences of home-culture, whose gospel
Richter here declares, our American parents have been too neglectful.
The world knows that we are proud, and justly so, of our public
educational apparatus. But that our legislation in this direction
produces nothing but good, no observing man can admit. This elaborate
reading-and-writing machine of which the State turns the handle, while
it induces a certain average sharpness in the children, leaves rusting
some of the noblest privileges as well as the highest duties of the
parent. Yet citizens will cry that they feel their responsibilities for
educating, and, to their better fulfilment, work daily for dollars. This
is well; but let us not throw our dollars in a parabolic curve over the
house, on the chance of their making a happy descent in some distant
school-room. The bringing-up of children is something very different
from pickling cucumbers or salting fish,--it cannot be done by contract
and in the gross. But, ah, there is no time for anything else! Then
reduce your way of living to anything above the food-and-shelter point,
and so make time. Richter was always poor, always a man of great labor
and great performance, and here is what he says:--"I deny myself my
evening meal in my eagerness to work; but the interruptions by my
children I cannot deny myself."
"Levana" is peculiarly adapted to cause those who have to do with
children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their
trust. It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement
which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent. There are,
indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of
unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart
or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life. But often
it is far otherwise. Too often, owing to the indolence or immaturity of
those who assume the responsibility of parents, the child is cast into a
terrible moral perplexity, which is at last moral corruption. Our duties
toward different children are as eclectic and irregular as Nature
herself. There is a need to study and respect the individual character,
which claims from parents the daily use of their mental powers,--and
this without a compelling external stimulus. Now it is easy and not
unpleasant to work in a routine. Schiller used to say that he found the
great happiness of life to consist in the discharge of some mechanical
duty. He was in the right. Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness
of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not
mechanical. Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the
multiplication of photographs from the teacher's negative, or, in the
words of Richter, "to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble
copies of the same pedagogue type." But the parent's office demands
courage,--courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of
thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago.
The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead
of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery.
Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that "scholastic
grossness of barbarous ages" from which we nineteenth-century citizens
have by no means escaped. "We do amiss," exclaims the eloquent scholar,
"to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable
Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in
one year." He denounces this "misspending our prime youth at schools and
universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things
chiefly as were better unlearned." We quote the words of Milton rather
than those of other eminent men to the same effect, because the poet
cannot be accused of objecting to Latin and Greek taught at the right
time and in the right way. A man whose mighty English was always fast
anchored to classic bottoms had surely no sentimental preference for
modern sciences. Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at
present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient
languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton
realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and
perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal
memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We
hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming
centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the
precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able
to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives
to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is
capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind
as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton. There
are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural
order, brings an immediate interest. It is no nebulous scheme of
combining instruction with amusement which is to be sought. One might as
well look after the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Good
things are to be had upon no easier terms than privation and work. But
there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material
comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and
reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and
a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting
clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be
intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of
work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him. But our
philanthropies in this direction may not be wrought by deputy; they must
be aimed at the few, and not at once at the many.
The reader of "Levana" will find much incidental commendation of those
true relations of intellectual sympathy and confidence between parents
and children which in this country are far rarer than they should be.
Seldom do we hear the average American citizen speak of either parent in
that tone of tender and respectful companionship with which the average
Frenchman pronounces "_ma mère_" or "_mon père_." Seldom do we see that
relation between an eminent man and his mother which, in the Old World,
has been exemplified from Augustine to Buckle. Some of the causes of
this have been admirably set forth in a recent essay in these pages. The
article by Gail Hamilton in the April number of the "Atlantic" contains
much _uncommon_ sense, which our lady-readers cannot ponder too often.
All honor to those mothers who, meeting extreme and unexpected poverty,
turn themselves into drudges that their children may be decently clothed
and wholesomely fed! But dishonor to those women who stunt their own
intellectual powers, which should educate and accompany the immortal
souls of their sons and daughters through this world and perhaps
another,--and this, in order that their bodies may be fed luxuriously,
or dressed in lace and ruffles to vie with the children of richer
neighbors! There can be no tolerance for the _indolence_--we emphasize
the word--which elects a mechanical routine instead of those harder
mental efforts through which a mother's highest duties may be
comprehended and performed. And what shall be said for the despicable
vanity which would barter opportunities of forming and directing a human
character for the sake of trimmings and fancy buttons? We cannot possess
the confidence and friendship of our children without taking pains to
deserve them. If the father chooses to be "the governor" of his family,
then the _ex-governor_, and nothing more, can he be to his grown-up
children,--an official once set over them by some Know-Nothing or other
fatality, at length happily shelved with the rubbish of the nursery.
Nowhere are the external sanctities of domestic life more respected than
in our Northern States, and here should its fairest promises be
bountifully fulfilled. Above all things, it is to be remembered that
whatever moral power a man would have his children possess, that must he
especially demand and exercise in himself. The Law of the household must
afford the luxury of a Conscience; for if ever the maxim "_Summum jus,
summa, injuria_" be worthy of remembrance, it is in the management of
children. Well for those who realize that education is no merely lineal
advancement, but a spreading and flowering in many directions! well for
those who cultivate all the capabilities of love and trust in their
children! "When I think," says Jean Paul, "that I never saw in my father
a trace of selfishness, I thank God!" There comes the time when young
men go forth to battle in the world, and the father prays bitterly for
the power to endow them with the results of his own experience. But only
to him who has borne himself truthfully and honorably before his family
can that good gift be given.
Upon the subject of religious education "Levana" is finely suggestive.
All cobweb-makeshifts which obscure the beautiful substance of a holy
life are swept aside. To the young, not what others say, but what they
do, is right. Children, like their elders, will resist all mere
reasoning upon the disadvantages, whether temporal or spiritual, of
actions to which they are tempted. But they are ever ready to absorb the
faith of the household, and to be nourished by it. "For those who wish
to give anything," exclaims our author, "the first rule is, that they
shall have it to give; no one can teach religion who does not himself
possess it; hypocrisy and mouth-religion will bring forth only their
like." The hardly noticeable habits of unrestrained intercourse, the
indulgence of petty selfishness not acknowledged to ourselves,--these
are seeds of evil quick to germinate in a virgin soil. No iteration of
pedagogical maxims can annul the influence of some little mean or
graceless act. Let every parent take heed lest, through his own weakness
and folly, he lose the divine privilege of obedience through confidence.
In the world, obedience through discipline must indeed come; but let it
be unknown in the family as long as it may. And of "mouth-religion" what
fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and
rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the
weary, sinful adult,--but to one who feels his life in every limb,
incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would
confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the
heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and
church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ears,
and then to make a sorry household jest of the feeble one's grotesque
attempts to extend or limit the Unspeakable. As the highest concerns of
man can be known only by the spirit, so they can be taught only by the
spirit. It is not the words we repeat, but the temper in which we daily
live, that moulds the family to honor or dishonor. It is the spirit of
the father and mother which produces results mistaken for intuitions by
the superficial. And, truly, youth, thus warmly rooted in generosity and
nobility, will, in its own good time, stretch tender leaves up to the
Higher Light. And when Nature is ready for worship, mark how wisely
Richter directs it:--"The sublime is a step to the temple of religion,
as the stars are to that of infinity. Let the name of God be heard by
the child in connection with all that is great in Nature,--the storm,
the thunder, the starry heavens, and death,--a great misfortune,--a
great piece of good-fortune,--a great crime,--a greatly noble action:
these are the sites on which to build the wandering church of
childhood."
In conclusion, we can only repeat, that the greatest charm of "Levana"
is its suggestion of a possible household, from what the reader feels
was once an actual household. The cheap sentimentalism of parental
relations has often been a favorite property with men of imaginative
genius. Rousseau and Byron knew how to use it as a fictitious background
before which they might posture with effect. But, until the world's
literature shall mercifully forget them, the "Enfants Trouvés" and the
Venetian bagnio strip these writers of their fine words, and hold them
before the generations in scandal and disgrace. No reader of "Levana"
can miss the refutation of that poisonous lie, that men of genius,
because of their mental endowments, have a natural inaptitude for
domestic relations, or are unhappy therein from any other cause than
their own foolishness or guilt. We hear the tender strains of a deep
poet, privileged by acquired worthiness to return to those divine
instincts which were vivid in the simplest condition of the family. To
all who can bring the writings of Richter within their range we commend
this book. Those who have learned to enjoy his strong-darting language,
his complex constructions, his kindly humor, will find these working
together with noblest aim. In these times of our country's peril, there
is some sanative virtue outside of treatises upon strategy or Union
pamphlets. It is well to print and circulate the literature of war. But
it is also a sweet and a timely mission to impart a new inspiration into
that life of the family to-day which shall become the life of the nation
to-morrow.