THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
* * * * *
VOLUME IX.
M DCCC LXII.
* * * * *
[Transcriber's note: Converted page numbers to issue numbers.]
CONTENTS. ISSUE.
A.C., The Experiences of the, 52.
Agnes of Sorrento, 51, 52, 53, 54.
American Civilization, 54.
Author of "Charles Auchester," The, 56.
Autobiographical Sketches of a Strength-Seeker, 51.
Childhood, Concerning the Sorrows of, 53.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 54.
Cooper, James Fenimore, 52.
Ease in Work, 52.
Forester, The, 54.
Fremont's Hundred Days in Missouri, 51, 52, 53.
Fruits of Free Labor in the Smaller Islands
of the British West Indies, 53.
German Burns, The, 54.
Health of Our Girls, The, 56.
Hindrance, 55.
Horrors of San Domingo, The, 56.
Individuality, 54.
Jefferson and Slavery, 51.
John Lamar, 54.
Letter to a Young Contributor, 54.
Light Literature, 51.
Love and Skates, 51, 52.
Man under Sealed Orders, 55.
Methods of Study in Natural History, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56.
My Garden, 55.
Old Age, 51.
Our Artists in Italy, 52.
Père Antoine's Date-Palm, 56.
Pilgrimage to Old Boston, 51.
Raft that no Man made, A, 53.
Richelieu, The Statesmanship of, 55.
Rifle, The Use of the, 53.
Saltpetre as a Source of Power, 55.
Sam Adams Regiments in the Town of Boston, The, 56.
Slavery, in its Principles, Development,
and Expedients, 55.
Snow, 52.
"Solid Operations in Virginia", 56.
South Breaker, The, 55, 56.
Spain, The Rehabilitation of, 53.
Spirits, 55.
Story of To-Day, A, 51, 52, 53.
Taxation, 53.
Then and Now in the Old Dominion, 54.
Walking, 56.
War and Literature, 56.
Weather in War, 55.
What shall We do with Them?, 54.
POETRY.
Astraea at the Capitol, 56.
At Port Royal, 1861, 52.
Battle-Hymn of the Republic, 52.
Birdofredum Sawin, Esq., to Mr. Hosea Biglow, 51, 53.
Compensation, 54.
Exodus, 54.
Lines written under a Portrait of Theodore
Winthrop, 55.
Lyrics of the Street, 55.
Mason and Slidell: A Yankee Idyl, 52.
Message of Jeff Davis in Secret Session, A, 54.
Midwinter, 52.
Mountain Pictures, 53, 54.
Order for a Picture, An, 56.
Out of the Body to God, 56.
Per Tenebras, Lumina, 51.
Sonnet, 56.
Southern Cross, The, 53.
Speech of Hon'ble Preserved Doe in Secret
Caucus, 55.
Strasburg Clock, The, 54.
Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line, 56.
Titmouse, The, 55.
True Heroine, The, 51.
Under the Snow, 55.
Volunteer, The, 55.
Voyage of the Good Ship Union, 53.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Arnold's Lectures on translating Homer, 51.
Book about Doctors, A, 54.
Botta's Discourse on the Life, Character,
and Policy of Count Cavour, 55.
Cloister and the Hearth, The, 52.
De Vere, Aubrey, Poems by, 54.
Dickens's Works, Household Edition, 55.
Harris's Insects Injurious to Vegetation, 55.
John Brent, 54.
Leigh Hunt, Correspondence of, 55.
Lessons in Life, 51.
Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, 51.
Newman's Homeric Translation in Theory and
in Practice, 51.
Pauli's Pictures of Old England, 55.
Record of an Obscure Man, 55.
Tragedy of Errors, 55.
Willmott's English Sacred Poetry, 52.
FOREIGN LITERATURE, 54, 55.
OBITUARY, 51.
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS, 52, 53, 54, 55.
* * * * *
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
* * * * *
VOL. IX.--JANUARY, 1862.--NO. LI.
* * * * *
METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.
I.
It is my intention, in this series of papers, to give the history of the
progress in Natural History from the beginning,--to show how men first
approached Nature,--how the facts of Natural History have been
accumulated, and how those facts have been converted into science. In so
doing, I shall present the methods employed in Natural History on a wider
scale and with broader generalizations than if I limited myself to the
study as it exists to-day. The history of humanity, in its efforts to
understand the Creation, resembles the development of any individual mind
engaged in the same direction. It has its infancy, with the first
recognition of surrounding objects; and, indeed, the early observers seem
to us like children in their first attempts to understand the world in
which they live. But these efforts, that appear childish to us now, were
the first steps in that field of knowledge which is so extensive that all
our progress seems only to show us how much is left to do.
Aristotle is the representative of the learning of antiquity in Natural
Science. The great mind of Greece in his day, and a leader in all the
intellectual culture of his time, he was especially a naturalist, and his
work on Natural History is a record not only of his own investigations,
but of all preceding study in this department. It is evident that even
then much had been done, and, in allusion to certain peculiarities of the
human frame, which he does not describe in full, he refers his readers to
familiar works, saying, that illustrations in point may be found in
anatomical text-books.[1]
[1] See Aristotle's _Zoölogy_, Book I., Chapter xiv.
Strange that in Aristotle's day, two thousand years ago, such books should
have been in general use, and that in our time we are still in want of
elementary text-books of Natural History, having special reference to the
animals of our own country, and adapted to the use of schools. One fact in
Aristotle's "History of Animals" is very striking, and makes it difficult
for us to understand much of its contents. It never occurs to him that a
time may come when the Greek language--the language of all culture and
science in his time--would not be the language of all cultivated men. He
took, therefore, little pains to characterize the animals he alludes to,
otherwise than by their current names; and of his descriptions of their
habits and peculiarities, much is lost upon us from their local character
and expression. There is also a total absence of systematic form, of any
classification or framework to express the divisions of the animal kingdom
into larger or lesser groups. His only divisions are genera and species:
classes, orders, and families, as we understand them now, are quite
foreign to the Greek conception of the animal kingdom. Fishes and birds,
for instance, they considered as genera, and their different
representatives as species. They grouped together quadrupeds also in
contradistinction to animals with legs and wings, and they distinguished
those that bring forth living young from those that lay eggs. But though a
system of Nature was not familiar even to their great philosopher, and
Aristotle had not arrived at the idea of a classification on general
principles, he yet stimulated a search into the closer affinities among
animals by the differences he pointed out. He divided the animal kingdom
into two groups, which he called _Enaima_ and _Anaima_, or animals with
blood and animals without blood. We must remember, however, that by the
word _blood_ he designated only the red fluid circulating in the higher
animals; whereas a fluid akin to blood exists in all animals, variously
colored in some, but colorless in a large number of others.
After Aristotle, a long period elapsed without any addition to the
information he left us. Rome and the Middle Ages gave us nothing, and even
Pliny added hardly a fact to those that Aristotle recorded. And though the
great naturalists of the sixteenth century gave a new impulse to this
study, their investigations were chiefly directed towards a minute
acquaintance with the animals they had an opportunity of observing,
mingled with commentaries upon the ancients. Systematic Zoölogy was but
little advanced by their efforts.
We must come down to the last century, to Linnæus, before we find the
history taken up where Aristotle had left it, and some of his suggestions
carried out with new vigor and vitality. Aristotle had distinguished only
between genera and species; Linnæus took hold of this idea, and gave
special names to other groups, of different weight and value. Besides
species and genera, he gives us orders and classes,--considering classes
the most comprehensive, then orders, then genera, then species. He did
not, however, represent these groups as distinguished by their nature, but
only by their range; they were still to him, as genera and species had
been to Aristotle, only larger or smaller groups, not founded upon and
limited by different categories of structure. He divided the animal
kingdom into six classes, which I give here, as we shall have occasion to
compare them with other classifications:--_Mammalia_, _Birds_, _Reptiles_,
_Fishes_, _Insects_, _Worms_.
That this classification should have expressed all that was known in the
last century of the most general relations among animals only shows how
difficult it is to generalize on such a subject; nor should we expect to
find it an easy task, when we remember the vast number of species (about a
quarter of a million) already noticed by naturalists. Linnæus succeeded,
however, in finding a common character on which to unite most of his
classes; but the Mammalia, that group to which we ourselves belong,
remained very imperfect. Indeed, in the earlier editions of his
classification, he does not apply the name of Mammalia to this class, but
calls the higher animals _Quadrupedia_, characterizing them as the animals
with four legs and covered with fur or hair, that bring forth living young
and nurse them with milk. In thus admitting external features as class
characters, he excluded many animals which by their mode of reproduction,
as well as by their respiration and circulation, belong to this class as
much as the Quadrupeds,--as, for instance, all the Cetaceans, (Whales,
Porpoises, and the like,) which, though they have not legs, nor are their
bodies covered with hair or fur, yet bring forth living young, nurse them
with milk, are warm-blooded and air-breathing. As more was learned of
these animals, there arose serious discussion and criticism among
contemporary naturalists respecting the classification of Linnæus, all of
which led to a clearer insight into the true relations among animals.
Linnæus himself, in his last edition of the "Systema Naturæ," shows us
what important progress he had made since he first announced his views;
for he there substitutes for the name of _Quadrupedia_ that of _Mammalia_,
including among them the Whales, which he characterizes as air-breathing,
warm-blooded, and bringing forth living young which they nurse with milk.
Thus the very deficiencies of his classification stimulated naturalists to
new criticism and investigation into the true limits of classes, and led
to the recognition of one most important principle,--that such groups are
founded, not on external appearance, but on internal structure, and that
internal structure, therefore, is the thing to be studied. The group of
Quadrupeds was not the only defective one in this classification of
Linnæus; his class of Worms, also, was most heterogeneous, for he included
among them Shell-Fishes, Slugs, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins, and other
animals that bear no relation whatever to the class of Worms.
But whatever its defects, the classification of Linnæus was the first
attempt at grouping animals together according to certain common
structural characters. His followers and pupils engaged at once in a
scrutiny of the differences and similarities among animals, which soon led
to a great increase in the number of classes: instead of six, there were
presently nine, twelve, and more. But till Cuvier's time there was no
great principle of classification. Facts were accumulated and more or less
systematized, but they were not yet arranged according to law; the
principle was still wanting by which to generalize them and give meaning
and vitality to the whole. It was Cuvier who found the key. He himself
tells us how he first began, in his investigations upon the internal
organization of animals, to use his dissections with reference to finding
the true relations between animals, and how, ever after, his knowledge of
anatomy assisted him in his classifications, and his classifications threw
new light again on his anatomical investigations,--each science thus
helping to fertilize the other. He was not one of those superficial
observers who are in haste to announce every new fact that they chance to
find, and his first paper[2] specially devoted to classification gave to
the world the ripe fruit of years of study. This was followed by his great
work, "Le Règne Animal." He said that animals were united in their most
comprehensive groups, not on special characters, but on different _plans
of structure_,--moulds, he called them, in which all animals had been
cast. He tells us this in such admirable language that I must, to do
justice to his thought, give it in his own words:--
"Si l'on considère le règne animal d'après les principes que nous
venons de poser en se débarrassant des préjugés établis sur les
divisions anciennement admises, en n'ayant égard qu'à
l'organisation et à la nature des animaux, et non pas à leur
grandeur, à leur utilité, au plus ou moins de connaissance que
nous en avons, ni à toutes les autres circonstances accessoires,
on trouvera qu'il existe quatre formes principales, quatre plans
généraux, si l'on peut s'exprimer ainsi, d'après lesquels tous les
animaux semblent avoir été modelés, et dont les divisions
ultérieures, de quelque titre que les naturalistes les aient
décorées, ne sont que des modifications assez légères, fondées sur
le développement ou l'addition de quelques parties, qui ne
changent rien à l'essence du plan."
[2] Sur un nouveau rapprochement à établir entre les Classes qui
composent le Règne Animal. _Ann. Mus._, Vol. XIX.
The value of this principle was soon tested by its application to facts
already known, and it was found that animals whose affinities had been
questionable before were now at once referred to their true relations with
other animals by ascertaining whether they were built on one or another of
these plans. Of such plans or structural conceptions Cuvier found in the
whole animal kingdom only four, which he called _Vertebrates_, _Mollusks_,
_Articulates_, and _Radiates_.
With this new principle as the basis of investigation, it was no longer
enough for the naturalist to know a certain amount of features
characteristic of a certain number of animals,--he must penetrate deep
enough into their organization to find the secret of their internal
structure. Till he can do this, he is like the traveller in a strange
city, who looks on the exterior of edifices entirely new to him, but knows
nothing of the plan of their internal architecture. To be able to read in
the finished structure the plan on which the whole is built is now
essential to every naturalist.
There have been many criticisms on this division of Cuvier's, and many
attempts to change it; but though some improvements have been made in the
details of his classification, all departures from its great fundamental
principle are errors, and do but lead us away from the recognition of the
true affinities among animals.
Each of these plans may be stated in the most general terms. In the
_Vertebrates_ there is a vertebral column terminating in a prominent head;
this column has an arch above and an arch below, forming a double internal
cavity. The parts are symmetrically arranged on either side of the
longitudinal axis of the body. In the _Mollusks_, also, the parts are
arranged according to a bilateral symmetry on either side of the body, but
the body has but one cavity, and is a soft, concentrated mass, without a
distinct individualization of parts. In the _Articulates_ there is but one
cavity, and the parts are here again arranged on either side of the
longitudinal axis, but in these animals the whole body is divided from end
to end into transverse rings or joints movable upon each other. In the
_Radiates_ we lose sight of the bilateral symmetry so prevalent in the
other three, except as a very subordinate element of structure; the plan
of this lowest type is an organic sphere, in which all parts bear definite
relations to a vertical axis.
It is not upon any special features, then, that these largest divisions of
the animal kingdom are based, but simply upon the general structural idea.
Striking as this statement was, it was coldly received at first by
contemporary naturalists: they could hardly grasp Cuvier's wide
generalizations, and perhaps there was also some jealousy of the grandeur
of his views. Whatever the cause, his principle of classification was not
fully appreciated; but it opened a new road for study, and gave us the
keynote to the natural affinities among animals. Lamarck, his
contemporary, not recognizing the truth of this principle, distributed the
animal kingdom into two great divisions, which he calls _Vertebrates_ and
_Invertebrates_. Ehrenberg also, at a later period, announced another
division under two heads,--those with a continuous solid nervous centre,
and those with merely scattered nervous swellings.[3]
[3] For more details upon the different systems of Zoölogy, see
Agassiz's Essay on Classification in his _Contributions to the
Natural History of the United States_, Vol. I.
But there was no real progress in either of these latter classifications,
so far as the primary divisions are concerned; for they correspond to the
old division of Aristotle, under the head of animals with or without
blood, the _Enaima_ and _Anaima_. This coincidence between systems based
on different foundations may teach us that every structural combination
includes certain inherent necessities which will bring animals together on
whatever set of features we try to classify them; so that the division of
Aristotle, founded on the circulating fluids, or that of Lamarck, on the
absence or presence of a backbone, or that of Ehrenberg, on the
differences of the nervous system, cover the same ground. Lamarck
attempted also to use the faculties of animals as a groundwork for
division among them. But our knowledge of the psychology of animals is
still too imperfect to justify any such use of it. His divisions into
Apathetic, Sensitive, and Intelligent animals are entirely theoretical. He
places, for instance, Fishes and Reptiles among the Intelligent animals,
as distinguished from Crustacea and Insects, which he refers to the second
division. But one would be puzzled to say how the former manifest more
intelligence than the latter, or why the latter should be placed among the
Sensitive animals. Again, some of the animals that he calls Apathetic have
been proved by later investigators to show an affection and care for their
young, seemingly quite inconsistent with the epithet he has applied to
them. In fact, we know so little of the faculties of animals that any
classification based upon our present information about them must be very
imperfect.
Many modifications of Cuvier's great divisions have been attempted. Some
naturalists, for instance, have divided off a part of the Radiates and
Articulates, insisting upon some special features of structure, and
mistaking these for the more important and general characteristics of
their respective plans. All subsequent investigations of such would-be
improvements show them to be retrograde movements, only proving more
clearly that Cuvier detected in his four plans all the great structural
ideas on which the vast variety of animals is founded. This result is of
greater importance than may at first appear. Upon it depends the question,
whether all such classifications represent merely individual impressions
and opinions of men, or whether there is really something in Nature that
presses upon us certain divisions among animals, certain affinities,
certain limitations, founded upon essential principles of organization.
Are our systems the inventions of naturalists, or only their reading of
the Book of Nature? and can that book have more than one reading? If these
classifications are not mere inventions, if they are not an attempt to
classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they are
thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in
Nature,--then Nature is the work of thought, the production of
intelligence carried out according to plan, therefore premeditated,--and
in our study of natural objects we are approaching the thoughts of the
Creator, reading His conceptions, interpreting a system that is His and
not ours.
All the divergence from the simplicity and grandeur of this division of
the animal kingdom arises from an inability to distinguish between a plan
and the execution, of a plan. We allow the details to shut out the plan
itself, which exists quite independent of special forms. I hope we shall
find a meaning in all these plans that will prove them to be the parts of
one great conception and the work of one Mind.
II.
Proceeding upon the view that there is a close analogy between the way in
which every individual student penetrates into Nature and the progress of
science as a whole in the history of humanity, I continue my sketch of the
successive steps that have led to our present state of knowledge. I began
with Aristotle, and showed that this great philosopher, though he prepared
a digest of all the knowledge belonging to his time, yet did not feel the
necessity of any system or of any scientific language differing from the
common mode of expression of his day. He presents his information as a man
with his eyes open narrates in a familiar style what he sees. As
civilization spread and science had its representatives in other countries
besides Greece, it became indispensable to have a common scientific
language, a technical nomenclature, combining many objects under common
names, and enabling every naturalist to express the results of his
observations readily and simply in a manner intelligible to all other
students of Natural History.
Linnæus devised such a system, and to him we owe a most simple and
comprehensive scientific mode of designating animals and plants. It may at
first seem no advantage to give up the common names of the vernacular and
adopt the unfamiliar ones, but a word of explanation will make the object
clear. Perceiving, for instance, the close relations between certain
members of the larger groups, Linnæus gave to them names that should be
common to all, and which are called generic names,--as we speak of Ducks,
when we would designate in one word the Mallard, the Widgeon, the
Canvas-Back, etc.; but to these generic names he added qualifying
epithets, called specific names, to indicate the different kinds in each
group. For example, the Lion, the Tiger, the Panther, the Domestic Cat
constitute such a natural group, which Linnæus called _Felis_, Cat,
indicating the whole genus; but the species he designates as _Felis
catus_, the Domestic Cat,--_Felis leo_, the Lion,--_Felis tigris_, the
Tiger,--_Felis panthera_, the Panther. So he called all the Dogs _Canis_;
but for the different kinds we have _Canis familiaris_, the Domestic
Dog,--_Canis lupus_, the Wolf,--_Canis vulpes_, the Fox, etc.
In some families of the vegetable kingdom we can appreciate better the
application of this nomenclature, because we have something corresponding
to it in the vernacular. We have, for instance, one name for all the Oaks,
but we call the different kinds Swamp Oak, Red Oak, White Oak, Chestnut
Oak, etc. So Linnæus, in his botanical nomenclature, called all the Oaks
by the generic name _Quercus_, (characterizing them by their fruit, the
acorn, common to all,) and qualified them as _Quercus bicolor_, _Quercus
rubra_, _Quercus alba_, _Quercus castanea_, etc., etc. His nomenclature,
being so easy of application, became at once exceedingly popular and made
him the great scientific legislator of his century. He insisted on Latin
names, because, if every naturalist should use his own language, it must
lead to great confusion, and this Latin nomenclature of double
significance was adopted by all. Another advantage of this binominal Latin
nomenclature consists in preventing the confusion frequently arising from
the use of the same name to designate different animals in different parts
of the world,--as, for instance, the name of Robin, used in America to
designate a bird of the Thrush family, entirely different from the Robin
of the Old World,--or of different names for the same animal, as Perch or
Chogset or Burgall for our Cunner. Nothing is more to be deprecated than
an over-appreciation of technicalities, valuing the name more highly than
the thing; but some knowledge of this nomenclature is necessary to every
student of Nature.
The improvements in science thus far were chiefly verbal. Cuvier now came
forward and added a principle. He showed that all animals are built upon a
certain number of definite plans. This momentous step, the significance of
which is not yet appreciated to its full extent; for, had its importance
been understood, the efforts of naturalists would have been directed
toward a further illustration of the distinctive characteristics of all
the plans,--instead of which, the division of the animal kingdom into
larger and smaller groups chiefly attracted their attention, and has been
carried too far by some of them. Linnæus began with six classes, Cuvier
brought them up to nineteen, and at last the animal kingdom was subdivided
by subsequent investigators into twenty-eight classes. This multiplication
of divisions, however, soon suggested an important question: How far are
these divisions natural or inherent in the objects themselves, and not
dependent on individual views?
While Linnæus pointed out classes, orders, genera, and species, other
naturalists had detected other divisions among animals, called families.
Lamarck, who had been a distinguished botanist before he began his study
of the animal kingdom, brought to his zoölogical researches his previous
methods of investigation. Families in the vegetable kingdom had long been
distinguished by French botanists; and one cannot examine the groups they
call by this name, without perceiving, that, though they bring them
together and describe them according to other characters, they have been
unconsciously led to unite them from the general similarity of their port
and bearing. Take, for instance, the families of Pines, Oaks, Beeches,
Maples, etc., and you feel at once, that, besides the common characters
given in the technical descriptions of these trees, there is also a
general resemblance among them that would naturally lead us to associate
them together, even if we knew nothing of the other features of their
structure. By an instinctive recognition of this family likeness between
plants, botanists have been led to seek for structural characters on which
to unite them, and the groups so founded generally correspond with the
combinations suggested by their appearance.
By a like process Lamarck combined animals into families. His method was
adopted by French naturalists generally, and found favor especially with
Cuvier, who was particularly successful in limiting families among
animals, and in naming them happily, generally selecting names expressive
of the features on which the groups were founded, or borrowing them from
familiar animals. Much, indeed, depends upon the pleasant sound and the
significance of a name; for an idea reaches the mind more easily when well
expressed, and Cuvier's names were both simple and significant. His
descriptions are also remarkable for their graphic precision,--giving all
that is essential, omitting all that is merely accessory. He has given us
the key-note to his progress in his own expressive language:--
"Je dus donc, et cette obligation me prit un temps considérable,
je dus faire marcher de front l'anatomie et la zoologie, les
dissections et le classement; chercher dans mes premières
remarques sur l'organisation des distributions meilleures; m'en
servir pour arriver à des remarques nouvelles; employer encore ces
remarques à perfectionner les distributions; faire sortir enfin de
cette fécondation mutuelle des deux sciences, l'une par l'autre,
un système zoologique propre à servir d'introducteur et de guide
dans le champ de l'anatomie, et un corps de doctrine anatomique
propre à servir de développement et d'explication au système
zoologique."
It is deeply to be lamented that so many naturalists have entirely
overlooked this significant advice of Cuvier's, to combine zoölogical and
anatomical studies in order to arrive at a clearer perception of the true
affinities among animals. To sum it up in one word, he tells us that the
secret of his method is "comparison,"--ever comparing and comparing
throughout the enormous range of his knowledge of the organization of
animals, and founding upon the differences as well as the similarities
those broad generalizations under which he has included all animal
structures. And this method, so prolific in his hands, has also a lesson
for us all. In this country there is a growing interest in the study of
Nature; but while there exist hundreds of elementary works illustrating
the native animals of Europe, there are few such books here to satisfy the
demand for information respecting the animals of our land and water. We
are thus forced to turn more and more to our own investigations and less
to authority; and the true method of obtaining independent knowledge is
this very method of Cuvier's,--comparison.
Let us make the most common application of it to natural objects. Suppose
we see together a Dog, a Cat, a Bear, a Horse, a Cow, and a Deer. The
first feature that strikes us as common to any two of them is the horn in
the Cow and Deer. But how shall we associate either of the others with
these? We examine the teeth, and find those of the Dog, the Cat, and the
Bear sharp and cutting, while those of the Cow, the Deer, and the Horse
have flat surfaces, adapted to grinding and chewing, rather than cutting
and tearing. We compare these features of their structure with the habits
of these animals, and find that the first are carnivorous, that they seize
and tear their prey, while the others are herbivorous or grazing animals,
living only on vegetable substances, which they chew and grind. We compare
farther the Horse and Cow, and find that the Horse has front teeth both in
the upper and lower jaw, while the Cow has them only in the lower; and
going still farther and comparing the internal with the external features,
we find this arrangement of the teeth in direct relation to the different
structure of the stomach in the two animals,--the Cow having a stomach
with four pouches, adapted to a mode of digestion by which the food is
prepared for the second mastication, while the Horse has a simple stomach.
Comparing the Cow and the Deer, we find that the digestive apparatus is
the same in both; but though they both have horns, in the Cow the horn is
hollow, and remains through life firmly attached to the bone, while in the
Deer it is solid and is shed every year. With these facts before us, we
cannot hesitate to place the Dog, the Cat, and the Bear in one division,
as carnivorous animals, and the other three in another division as
herbivorous animals,--and looking a little farther, we perceive, that, in
common with the Cow and the Deer, the Goat and the Sheep have cloven feet,
and that they are all ruminants, while the Horse has a single hoof, does
not ruminate, and must therefore be separated from them, even though, like
them, he is herbivorous.
This is but the simplest illustration, taken from the most familiar
objects, of this comparative method; but the same process is equally
applicable to the most intricate problems in animal structures, and will
give us the clue to all true affinities between animals. The education of
a naturalist, now, consists chiefly in learning how to compare. If he have
any power of generalization, when he has collected his facts, this habit
of mental comparison will lead him up to principles, to the great laws of
combination. It must not discourage us, that the process is a slow and
laborious one, and the results of one lifetime after all very small. It
might seem invidious, were I to show here how small is the sum total of
the work accomplished even by the great exceptional men, whose names are
known throughout the civilized world. But I may at least be permitted to
speak of my own efforts, and to sum up in the fewest words the result of
my life's work. I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and
yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that
there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological
times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,--this is all.
It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has
led to other conclusions of a like nature. But, such as it is, it has been
reached by this system of comparison, which, though I speak of it now in
its application to the study of Natural History, is equally important in
every other branch of knowledge. By the same process the most mature
results of scientific research in Philology, in Ethnology, and in Physical
Science are reached. And let me say that the community should foster the
purely intellectual efforts of scientific men as carefully as they do
their elementary schools and their practical institutions, generally
considered so much more useful and important to the public. For from what
other source shall we derive the higher results that are gradually woven
into the practical resources of our life, except from the researches of
those very men who study science not for its uses, but for its truth? It
is this that gives it its noblest interest: it must be for truth's sake,
and not even for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the
scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to the useful
arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other tools than his; and
therefore I say that the man of science who follows his studies into their
practical application is false to his calling. The practical man stands
ever ready to take up the work where the scientific man leaves it, and to
adapt it to the material wants and uses of daily life.
The publication of Cuvier's proposition, that the animal kingdom is built
on four plans, created an extraordinary excitement throughout the
scientific world. All naturalists proceeded to test it, and many soon
recognized in it a great scientific truth,--while others, who thought more
of making themselves prominent than of advancing science, proposed poor
amendments, that were sure to be rejected on farther investigation. There
were, however, some of these criticisms and additions that were truly
improvements, and touched upon points overlooked by Cuvier. Blainville,
especially, took up the element of form among animals,--whether divided on
two sides, whether radiated, whether irregular, etc. He, however, made the
mistake of giving very elaborate names to animals already known under
simpler ones. Why, for instance, call all animals with parts radiating in
every direction _Actinomorpha_ or _Actinozoaria_, when they had received
the significant name of _Radiates_? It seemed, to be a new system, when in
fact it was only a new name. Ehrenberg, likewise, made an important
distinction, when he united the animals according to the difference in
their nervous systems; but he also incumbered the nomenclature
unnecessarily, when he added to the names _Anaima_ and _Enaima_ of
Aristotle those of _Myeloneura_ and _Ganglioneura_.
But it is not my object to give all the classifications of different
authors here, and I will therefore pass over many noted ones, as those of
Burmeister, Milne, Edwards, Siebold and Stannius, Owen, Leuckart, Vogt,
Van Beneden, and others, and proceed to give some account of one
investigator who did as much for the progress of Zoölogy as Cuvier, though
he is comparatively little known among us. Karl Ernst von Baer proposed a
classification based, like Cuvier's, upon plan; but he recognized what
Cuvier failed to perceive,--namely, the importance of distinguishing
between type (by which he means exactly what Cuvier means by plan) and
complication of structure,--in other words, between plan and the execution
of the plan. He recognized four types, which correspond exactly to
Cuvier's four plans, though he calls them by different names. Let us
compare them.
_Cuvier_. _Baer_.
Radiates, Peripheric,
Mollusks, Massive,
Articulates, Longitudinal,
Vertebrates. Doubly Symmetrical.
Though perhaps less felicitous, the names of Baer express the same ideas
as those of Cuvier. By the _Peripheric_ he signified those in which all
the parts converge from the periphery or circumference of the animal to
its centre. Cuvier only reverses this definition in his name of
_Radiates_, signifying the animals in which all parts radiate from the
centre to the circumference. By _Massive_, Baer indicated those animals in
which the structure is soft and concentrated, without a very distinct
individualization of parts,--exactly the animals included by Cuvier under
his name of _Mollusks_, or soft-bodied animals. In his selection of the
epithet _Longitudinal_, Baer was less fortunate; for all animals have a
longitudinal diameter, and this word was not, therefore, sufficiently
special. Yet his _Longitudinal_ type answers exactly to Cuvier's
_Articulates_,--animals in which all parts are arranged in a succession of
articulated joints along a longitudinal axis. Cuvier has expressed this
jointed structure in the name _Articulates_; whereas Baer, in his name of
_Longitudinal_, referred only to the arrangement of joints in longitudinal
succession, in a continuous string, as it were, one after another. For the
_Doubly Symmetrical_ type his name is the better of the two; for Cuvier's
name of _Vertebrates_ alludes only to the backbone,--while Baer, who is an
embryologist, signifies in his their mode of growth also. He knew what
Cuvier did not know, that in its first formation the germ of the
Vertebrate divides in two folds: one turning up above the backbone, to
inclose all the sensitive Organs,--the spinal marrow, the organs of sense,
all those organs by which life is expressed; the other turning down below
the backbone, and inclosing all those organs by which life is
maintained,--the organs of digestion, of respiration, of circulation, of
reproduction, etc. So there is in this type not only an equal division of
parts on either side, but also a division above and below, making thus a
double symmetry in the plan, expressed by Baer in the name he gave it.
Baer was perfectly original in his conception of these four types, for his
paper was published in the very same year with that of Cuvier. But even in
Germany, his native land, his ideas were not fully appreciated: strange
that it should be so,--for, had his countrymen recognized his genius, they
might have claimed him as the compeer of the great French naturalist.
Baer also founded the science of Embryology, under the guidance of his
teacher, Dollinger. His researches in this direction showed him that
animals were not only built on four plans, but that they grew according to
four modes of development. The Vertebrate arises from the egg differently
from the Articulate,--the Articulate differently from the Mollusk,--the
Mollusk differently from the Radiate. Cuvier only showed us the four plans
as they exist in the adult; Baer went a step farther, and showed us the
four plans in the process of formation. But his greatest scientific
achievement is perhaps the discovery that all animals originate in eggs,
and that all these eggs are at first identical in substance and structure.
The wonderful and untiring research condensed into this simple statement,
that all animals arise from eggs and that all those eggs are identical in
the beginning, may well excite our admiration. This egg consists of an
outer envelope, the vitelline membrane, containing a fluid more or less
dense, the yolk; within this is a second envelope, the so-called
germinative vesicle, containing a somewhat different and more transparent
fluid, and in the fluid of this second envelope float one or more
so-called germinative specks. At this stage of their growth all eggs are
microsopically small, yet each one has such tenacity of its individual
principle of life that no egg was ever known to swerve from the pattern of
the parent animal that gave it birth.
III.
From the time that Linnæus showed us the necessity of a scientific system
as a framework for the arrangement of scientific facts in Natural History,
the number of divisions adopted by zoölogists and botanists increased
steadily. Not only were families, orders, and classes added to genera and
species, but these were further multiplied by subdivisions of the
different groups. But as the number of divisions increased, they lost in
precise meaning, and it became more and more doubtful how far they were
true to Nature. Moreover, these divisions were not taken in the same sense
by all naturalists: what were called families by some were called orders
by others, while the orders of some were the classes of others, till it
began to be doubted whether these scientific systems had any foundation in
Nature, or signified anything more than that it had pleased Linnæus, for
instance, to call certain groups of animals by one name, while Cuvier had
chosen to call them by another.
These divisions are, first, the most comprehensive groups, the primary
divisions, called branches by some, types by others, and divided by some
naturalists into so-called sub-types, meaning only a more limited
circumscription of the same kind of group; next we have classes, and these
also have been divided into sub-classes, then orders and sub-orders,
families, sub-families, and tribes; then genera, species, and varieties.
With reference to the question, whether these groups really exist in
Nature or are merely the expression of individual theories and opinions,
it is worth while to study the works of the early naturalists, in order to
trace the natural process by which scientific classification has been
reached; for in this, as in other departments of learning, practice has
always preceded theory. We do the thing before we understand why we do it:
speech precedes grammar, reason precedes logic; and so a division of
animals into groups, upon an instinctive perception of their differences,
has preceded all our scientific creeds and doctrines. Let us, therefore,
proceed to examine the meaning of these names as adopted by naturalists.
When Cuvier proposed his four primary divisions of the animal kingdom, he
added his argument for their adoption,--_because_, he said, they are
constructed on four different plans. All the progress in our science since
his time confirms this result; and I shall attempt to show that there are
really four, and only four, such structural ideas at the foundation of the
animal kingdom, and that all animals are included under one or another of
them. But it does not follow, that, because we have arrived at a sound
principle, we are therefore unerring in our practice. From ignorance we
may misplace animals, and include them under the wrong division. This is a
mistake, however, which a better insight into their organization
rectifies; and experience constantly proves, that, whenever the structure
of an animal is perfectly understood, there is no hesitation as to the
head under which it belongs. We may consequently test the merits of these
four primary groups on the evidence furnished by investigation. It has
already been seen that these plans may be presented in the most abstract
manner without any reference to special animals. _Radiation_ expresses in
one word the idea on which the lowest of these types is based. In
_Radiates_ we have no prominent bilateral symmetry, as in all other
animals, but an all-sided symmetry, in which there is no right and left,
no anterior and posterior extremity, no above and below. They are
spheroidal bodies; yet, though many of them remind us of a sphere, they
are by no means to be compared to a mathematical sphere, but rather to an
organic sphere, so loaded with life, as it were, as to produce an infinite
variety of radiate symmetry. The whole organization is arranged around a
centre toward which all the parts converge, or, in a reverse sense, from
which all the parts radiate. In _Mollusks_ there is a longitudinal axis
and a bilateral symmetry; but the longitudinal axis in these soft
concentrated bodies is not very prominent; and though the two ends of this
axis are distinct from each other, the difference is not so marked that we
can say at once, for all of them, which is the anterior and which the
posterior extremity. In this type, right and left have the preponderance
over the other diameters of the body. The sides are the prominent
parts,--they are charged with the important organs, loaded with those
peculiarities of the structure that give it character. The Oyster is a
good instance of this, with its double valve, so swollen on one side, so
flat on the other. There is an unconscious recognition of this in the
arrangement of all collections of Mollusks; for, though the collectors do
not put up their specimens with any intention of illustrating this
peculiarity, they instinctively give them the position best calculated to
display their distinctive characteristics, and to accomplish this they
necessarily place them in such a manner as to show the sides. In
_Articulates_ there is also a longitudinal axis of the body and a
bilateral symmetry in the arrangement of parts; the head and tail are
marked, and the right and left sides are distinct. But the prominent
tendency in this type is the development of the dorsal and ventral region;
here above and below prevail over right and left. It is the back and the
lower side that have the preponderance over any other part of the
structure in Articulates. The body is divided from end to end by a
succession of transverse constrictions, forming movable rings; but the
character of the animal, its striking features, are always above or below,
and especially developed on the back. Any collection of Insects or
Crustacea is an evidence of this; being always instinctively arranged in
such a manner as to show the predominant features, they uniformly exhibit
the back of the animal. The profile view of an Articulate has no
significance; whereas in a Mollusk, on the contrary, the profile view is
the most illustrative of the structural character. In the highest
division, the _Vertebrates_, so characteristically called by Baer the
_Doubly Symmetrical_ type, a solid column runs through the body with an
arch above and an arch below, thus forming a double internal cavity. In
this type, the head is the prominent feature; it is, as it were, the
loaded end of the longitudinal axis, so charged with vitality as to form
an intelligent brain, and rising in man to such predominance as to command
and control the whole organism. The structure is arranged above and below
this axis, the upper cavity containing all the sensitive organs, and the
lower cavity containing all those by which life is maintained.
While Cuvier and his followers traced these four distinct plans, as shown
in the adult animal, Baer opened to us a new field of investigation in the
embryology of the four types, showing that for each there was a special
mode of growth in the egg. Looking at them from this point of view, we
shall see that these four types, with their four modes of growth, seem to
fill out completely the plan or outline of the animal kingdom, and leave
no reason to expect any further development or any other plan of animal
life within these limits. The eggs of all animals are spheres, such as I
have described them; but in the Radiate the whole periphery is transformed
into the germ, so that it becomes, by the liquefying of the yolk, a hollow
sphere. In the Mollusks, the germ lies above the yolk, absorbing its whole
substance through the under side, thus forming a massive close body
instead of a hollow one. In the Articulate, the germ is turned in a
position exactly opposite to that of the Mollusk, and absorbs the yolk
upon the back. In the Vertebrate, the germ divides in two folds, one
turning upward, the other turning downward, above and below the central
backbone. These four modes of development seem to exhaust the
possibilities of the primitive sphere, which is the foundation of all
animal life, and therefore I believe that Cuvier and Baer were right in
saying that the whole animal kingdom is included under these four
structural ideas.
Leuckart proposed to subdivide the Radiates into two groups: the
Coelenterata, including Polyps and Acalephs or Jelly-Fishes,--and
Echinoderms, including Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins, and Holothurians. His
reason for this distinction is the fact that in the latter the organs are
inclosed within walls of their own, distinct from the body-wall; whereas
in the former the organs are formed by internal folds of the outer wall of
the body, as in the Polyps, or are hollowed out of the substance of the
body, as in Jelly-Fishes. This implies no difference in the plan, but
merely a difference in the execution of the plan. Both are equally radiate
in their structure; and when Leuckart separated them as distinct primary
types, he mistook a difference in the material expression of the plan for
a difference in the plan itself. So some naturalists have distinguished
Worms from the other Articulates as a separate division. But the
structural plan of this type is a body divided by transverse constrictions
or joints; and whether those joints are uniformly arranged from one end of
the body to the other, as in the Worms, or whether the front joints are
soldered together so as to form two regions of the body, as in Crustacea,
or divided so as to form three regions of the body, as in winged Insects,
does not in the least affect the typical character of the structure, which
remains the same in all. Branches or types, then, are natural groups of
the animal kingdom, founded on plans of structure or structural ideas.
What now are classes? Are they lesser divisions, differing only in extent,
or are they founded on special characters? I believe the latter view to be
the true one, and that class characters have a significance quite
different from that of their mere range or extent. These divisions are
founded on certain categories of structure; and were there but one animal
of a class in the world, if it had those characters on which a class is
founded, it would be as distinct from all other animals as if its kind
were counted by thousands. Baer approached the idea of the classes when he
discriminated between plan of structure or type and the degree of
perfection in the structure. But while he understands the distinction
between a plan and its execution, his ideas respecting the different
features of structure are not quite so precise. He does not, for instance,
distinguish between the complication of a given structure and the mode of
execution of a plan, both of which are combined in what he calls degrees
of perfection. And yet, without this distinction, the difference between
classes and orders cannot be understood; for classes and orders rest upon
a just appreciation of these two categories, which are quite distinct from
each other, and have by no means the same significance. Again, quite
distinct from both of these is the character of form, not to be confounded
either with complication of structure, on which orders are based, or with
the execution of the plan, on which classes rest. An example will show
that form is no guide for the determination of classes or orders. Take,
for instance, a Beche-de-Mer, a member of the highest class of Radiates,
and compare it with a Worm. They are both long cylindrical bodies; but one
has parallel divisions along the length of the body, the other has the
body divided by transverse rings. Though in external form they resemble
each other, the one is a worm-like Radiate, the other is a worm-like
Articulate, each having the structure of its own type; so that they do not
even belong to the same great division of the animal kingdom, much less to
the same class. We have a similar instance in the Whales and Fishes,--the
Whales having been for a long time considered as Fishes, on account of
their form, while their structural complication shows them to be a low
order of the class of Mammalia, to which we ourselves belong, that class
being founded upon a particular mode of execution of the plan
characteristic of the Vertebrates, while the order to which the Whales
belong depends upon their complication of structure, as compared with
other members of the same class. We may therefore say that neither form
nor complication of structure distinguishes classes, but simply the mode
of execution of a plan. In Vertebrates, for instance, how do we
distinguish the class of Mammalia from the other classes of the type? By
the peculiar development of the brain, by their breathing through lungs,
by their double circulation, by their bringing forth living young and
nursing them with milk. In this class the beasts of prey form a distinct
order, superior to the Whales or the herbivorous animals, on account of
the higher complication of their structure; and for the same reason we
place the Monkeys above them all. But among the beasts of prey we
distinguish the Bears, as a family, from the family of Dogs, Wolves, and
Cats, on account of their different form, which does not imply a
difference either in the complication of their structure or in the mode of
execution of their plan.
* * * * *
AGNES OF SORRENTO.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PENANCE.
The course of our story requires us to return to the Capuchin convent, and
to the struggles and trials of its Superior; for in his hands is the
irresistible authority which must direct the future life of Agnes.
From no guilty compliances, no heedless running into temptation, had he
come to love her. The temptation had met him in the direct path of duty;
the poison had been breathed in with the perfume of sweetest and most
life-giving flowers: nor could he shun that temptation, nor cease to
inhale that fatal sweetness, without confessing himself vanquished in a
point where, in his view, to yield was to be lost. The subtle and
deceitful visit of Father Johannes to his cell had the effect of
thoroughly rousing him to a complete sense of his position, and making him
feel the immediate, absolute necessity of bringing all the energy of his
will, all the resources of his nature to bear on its present difficulties.
For he felt, by a fine intuition, that already he was watched and
suspected;--any faltering step now, any wavering, any change in his mode
of treating his female penitents, would be maliciously noted. The military
education of his early days had still left in his mind a strong residuum
of personal courage and honor, which made him regard it as dastardly to
flee when he ought to conquer, and therefore he set his face as a flint
for victory.
But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the work before
him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which often becomes so
vivid in the history of individuals of strong will and passion. It seemed
to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate,
demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and
conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual
life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the
monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of
the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times
disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the
nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord
sometimes utterly bewilders the most practised self-government.
But he felt that _something_ must be done with himself, and done
immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the
confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate
fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hear her
confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments with a
divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of her secret
heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses of those
fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must
tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of the insidiousness
of earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how a
name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the sacred shrine
in her most retired and solemn hours might at last come to fill all her
heart with a presence too dangerously dear. He must direct her gaze up
those mystical heights where an unearthly marriage awaited her, its sealed
and spiritual bride; he must hurry her footsteps onward to the irrevocable
issue.
All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must subdue
himself,--he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; and what
prayer, what penance might avail for this? If all that he had already
tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He resolved to quit for a season
all human society, and enter upon one of those desolate periods of retreat
from earthly converse well known in the annals of saintship as most
prolific in spiritual victories.
Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes, he
startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leave them
for several days.
"My brothers," he said, "the weight of a fearful penance is laid upon me,
which I must work out alone. I leave you today, and charge you not to
seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watch and
wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone. Before many days
I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength."
That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in their
orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of a very
different description surrounded the Father Francesco.
One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchanting
region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on earth a
more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it to him,
that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary region which
might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.
Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas garlanded with
roses and flushing with grapes whose juice gains warmth from the breathing
of its subterraneous fires, while just above them rises a region more
awful than can be created by the action of any common causes of sterility.
There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so
peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one
enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural.
On all sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their
immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in their
fiery agonies, they had struggled and wreathed and knotted together, and
then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs of those terrific
convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the
hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene.
The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is
ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life,--of goblin convulsions
and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps
have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the
rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,--as if
its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact
revealed it.
The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,--with its
enchanted islands, its jewelled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked
and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and
shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivity and
singing,--when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the
mountain, and, seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked down
on the peaceful landscape.
Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain, over
whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tinged with
the evening light; around him the desolate convulsed waste,--so arid, so
supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanted dream, the
beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, the picturesque
islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyed with the violet
and pink and purple of the evening sky. The thin new moon and one
glittering star trembled through the rosy air.
The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by the toil of
his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the Ave Maria pealing
from the different churches of Naples, filling the atmosphere with a soft
tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if spirits in the air took up and
repeated over and over the angelic salutation which a thousand earthly
lips were just then uttering. Mechanically he joined in the invocation
which at that moment united the hearts of all Christians, and as the words
passed his lips, he thought, with a sad, desolate longing, of the hour of
death of which they spake.
"It must come at last," he said. "Life is but a moment. Why am I so
cowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to struggle? Am I a warrior of
the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long for the
ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor for happiness?
Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is the world made so
lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girt with splendor and
beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance and toil were all we were
sent here for, why not make a world grim and desolate as this around
me?--then there would be nothing to seduce us. But our path is a constant
fight; Nature is made only to be resisted; we must walk the sharp blade of
the sword over the fiery chasm to Paradise. Come, then!--no
shrinking!--let me turn my back on everything dear and beautiful, as now
on this landscape!"
He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone, stumbling and
climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava, which grated and
crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic ring. Sometimes a broken
fragment or two would go tinkling down the rough path behind him, and
sometimes it seemed as if the whole loose black mass from above were about
to slide, like an avalanche, down upon his head;--he almost hoped it
would. Sometimes he would stop, overcome by the toil of the ascent, and
seat himself for a moment on a black fragment, and then his eye would
wander over the wide and peaceful panorama below. He seemed to himself
like a fly perched upon some little roughness of a perpendicular wall, and
felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in being thus between earth and
heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty, and peacefulness would steal over
him, as if he were indeed something disfranchised and disembodied, a part
of the harmonious and beautiful world that lay stretched out beneath him;
in a moment more he would waken himself with a start, and resume his
toilsome journey with a sullen and dogged perseverance.
At last he gained the top of the mountain,--that weird, strange region
where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was no honest
foodful mother earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosive minerals.
Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were in all he touched,
every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam, while rolling clouds
of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming, like the roar of an
immense furnace, told his nearness to the great crater. He penetrated the
sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very brink of a huge basin, formed by
a wall of rocks around a sunken plain, the midst of which rose the black
cone of the subterraneous furnace, which crackled and roared and from time
to time spit up burning stones and cinders or oozed out slow ropy streams
of liquid fire.
The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of brown and
orange by the admixture of various ores, but their brightness seemed
strange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of vapor, now enveloping
the whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this spot and now in that, seemed
to magnify the dismal pit to an indefinite size. Now and then there would
come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort of convulsed sob of
hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath his feet, and fragments
from the surrounding rocks would scale off and fall with crashing
reverberations into the depth beneath; at such moments it would seem as if
the very mountain were about to crush in and bear him down in its ruins.
Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the vapor,
could not be content without descending into the abyss and exploring the
very _penetralia_ of its mysteries. Steadying his way by means of a cord
which he fastened to a firm projecting rock, he began slowly and painfully
clambering downward. The wind was sweeping across the chasm from behind,
bearing the noxious vapors away from him, or he must inevitably have been
stifled. It took him some little time, however, to effect his descent; but
at length he found himself fairly landed on the dark floor of the gloomy
inclosure.
The ropy, pitch-black undulations of lava yawned here and there in red-hot
cracks and seams, making it appear to be only a crust over some fathomless
depth of molten fire, whose moanings and boilings could be heard below.
These dark congealed billows creaked and bent as the monk stepped upon
them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yet he stumbled on.
Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lava had hardened in a
thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly back from the lurid red-hot
metal beneath. The staff on which he rested was constantly kindling into a
light blaze as it slipped into some heated hollow, and he was fain to beat
out the fire upon the cooler surface. Still he went on half-stifled by the
hot and pungent vapor, but drawn by that painful, unnatural curiosity
which possesses one in a nightmare dream. The great cone in the centre was
the point to which he wished to attain,--the nearest point which man can
gain to this eternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual
vibration, a hollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging of the
sea before a storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides rolled slowly
down with a strange creaking; it seemed the condensed, intensified essence
and expression of eternal fire, rising and still rising from some
inexhaustible fountain of burning.
Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat and vapor,
and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently. The lurid light of the
fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale, sunken features, his wild,
haggard eyes, and his torn and disarranged garments. In the awful solitude
and silence of the night he felt his heart stand still, as if indeed he
had touched with his very hand the gates of eternal woe, and felt its
fiery breath upon his cheek. He half-imagined that the seams and clefts
which glowed in lurid lines between the dark billows would gape yet wider
and show the blasting secrets of some world of fiery despair below. He
fancied that he heard behind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and
that confused clamor of mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante
describes as filling the dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope
never enters.
"Ah, God," he exclaimed, "for this vain life of man! They eat, they drink,
they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage, they have
castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty of Paradise seems over
it all,--and yet how close by burns and roars the eternal fire! Fools that
we are, to clamor for indulgence and happiness in this life, when the
question is, to escape everlasting burnings! If I tremble at this outer
court of God's wrath and justice, what must be the fires of hell? These
are but earthly fires; they can but burn the body: those are made to burn
the soul; they are undying as the soul is. What would it be to be dragged
down, down, down, into an abyss of soul-fire hotter than this for ages on
ages? This might bring merciful death in time: that will have no end."
The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications. Every
nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer. It was
not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing for forgiveness,
not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguish of him who shrieks
in the immediate apprehension of an unendurable torture. It was the cry of
a man upon the rack, the despairing scream of him who feels himself
sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguish has found an utterance in
Stradella's celebrated "Pietà, Signore," which still tells to our ears, in
its wild moans and piteous shrieks, the religious conceptions of his day;
for there is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in
its music.
When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too dreadful
to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with difficulty up the
steep sides of the crater, till he gained the summit above, where a
comparatively free air revived him. All night he wandered up and down in
that dreary vicinity, now listening to the mournful roar and crackle of
the fire, and now raising his voice in penitential psalms or the notes of
that terrific "Dies Iræ" which sums up all the intense fear and horror
with which the religion of the Middle Ages clothed the idea of the final
catastrophe of humanity. Sometimes prostrating himself with his face
towards the stifling soil, he prayed with agonized intensity till Nature
would sink in a temporary collapse, and sleep, in spite of himself, would
steal over him.
So waned the gloomy hours of the night away, till the morning broke in the
east, turning all the blue wavering floor of the sea to crimson
brightness, and bringing up, with the rising breeze, the barking of dogs,
the lowing of kine, the songs of laborers and boatmen, all fresh and
breezy from the repose of the past night.
Father Francesco heard the sound of approaching footsteps climbing the
lava path, and started with a nervous trepidation. Soon he recognized a
poor peasant of the vicinity, whose child he had tended during a dangerous
illness. He bore with him a little basket of eggs, with a melon and a
fresh green salad.
"Good morning, holy father," he said, bowing humbly. "I saw you coming
this way last night, and I could hardly sleep for thinking of you; and my
good woman, Teresina, would have it that I should come out to look after
you. I have taken the liberty to bring a little offering;--it was the best
we had."
"Thank you, my son," said the monk, looking wistfully at the fresh, honest
face of the peasant. "You have taken too much trouble for such a sinner. I
must not allow myself such indulgences."
"But your Reverence must live. Look you," said the peasant, "at least your
Reverence will take an egg. See here, how handily I can cook one," he
added, striking his stick into a little cavity of a rock, from which, as
from an escape-valve, hissed a jet of hot steam,--"see here, I nestle the
egg in this little cleft, and it will be done in a twinkling. Our good God
gives us our fire for nothing here."
There was something wholesomely kindly and cheerful in the action and
expression of the man, which broke upon the overstrained and disturbed
musings of the monk like daylight on a ghastly dream. The honest, loving
heart sees love in everything; even the fire is its fatherly helper, and
not its avenging enemy.
Father Francesco took the egg, when it was done, with a silent gesture of
thanks.
"If I might make bold to say," said the peasant, encouraged, "your
Reverence should have some care for yourself. If a man will not feed
himself, the good God will not feed him; and we poor people have too few
friends already to let such as you die. Your hands are trembling, and you
look worn out. Surely you should take something more, for the very love of
the poor."
"My son, I am bound to do a heavy penance, and to work out a great
conflict. I thank you for your undeserved kindness. Leave me now to
myself, and come no more to disturb my prayers. Go, and God bless you!"
"Well," said the peasant, putting down the basket and melon, "I shall
leave these things here, any way, and I beg your Reverence to have a care
of yourself. Teresina fretted all night for fear something might come to
you. The bambino that you cured is grown a stout little fellow, and eats
enough for two,--and it is all of you; so she cannot forget it. She is a
busy little woman, is Teresina; and when she gets a thought in her head,
it buzzes, buzzes, like a fly in a bottle, and she will have it your
Reverence is killing yourself by inches, and says she, 'What will all the
poor do when he is gone?' So your Reverence must pardon us. We mean it all
for the best."
So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down the steep
ashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which carried him to the
bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending back after him a cheerful
little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard in our days in that
neighborhood. A word or two of the gay song fluttered back on the ear of
the monk,--
"Tutta gieja, tutta festa."
So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a musical
laugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into the dismal
smoke and gloom of the mountain-top like a very butterfly of sound. It
struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much as we might fancy the carol
of a robin over a grave might seem, could the cold sleeper below wake one
moment to its perception. If it woke one regretful sigh and drew one
wandering look downward to the elysian paradise that lay smiling at the
foot of the mountain, he instantly suppressed the feeling, and set his
face in its old deathly stillness.
CHAPTER XIX.
CLOUDS DEEPENING.
After the departure of her uncle to Florence, the life of Agnes was
troubled and harassed from a variety of causes.
First, her grandmother was sulky and moody, and though saying nothing
directly on the topic nearest her heart, yet intimating by every look and
action that she considered Agnes as a most ungrateful and contumacious
child. Then there was a constant internal perplexity,--a constant wearying
course of self-interrogation and self-distrust, the pain of a sensitive
spirit which doubts at every moment whether it may not be falling into
sin. The absence of her kind uncle at this time took from her the
strongest support on which she had leaned in her perplexities. Cheerful,
airy, and elastic in his temperament, always full of fresh-springing and
beautiful thoughts, as an Italian dell is of flowers, the charming old man
seemed, while he stayed with Agnes, to be the door of a new and fairer
world, where she could walk in air and sunshine, and find utterance for a
thousand thoughts and feelings which at all other times lay in cold
repression in her heart. His counsels were always so wholesome, his
sympathies so quick, his devotion so fervent and cheerful, that while with
him Agnes felt the burden of her life insensibly lifted and carried for
her as by some angel guide.
Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold than ever
they had been before. Never did she so much need counsel and
guidance,--never had she so much within herself to be solved and made
plain to her own comprehension; yet she thought with a strange shiver of
her next visit to her confessor. That austere man, so chilling, so awful,
so far above all conception of human weaknesses, how should she dare to
lay before him all the secrets of her breast, especially when she must
confess to having disobeyed his most stringent commands? She had had
another interview with this forbidden son of perdition, but how it was she
knew not. How could such things have happened? Instead of shutting her
eyes and turning her head and saying prayers, she had listened to a
passionate declaration of love, and his last word had called her his wife.
Her heart thrilled every time she thought of it; and somehow she could not
feel sure that it was exactly a thrill of penitence. It was all like a
strange dream to her; and sometimes she looked at her little brown hands
and wondered if he really had kissed them,--he, the splendid strange
vision of a man, the prince from fairyland! Agnes had never read romances,
it is true, but she had been brought up on the legends of the saints, and
there never was a marvel possible to human conception that had not been
told there. Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia and
every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet of fair,
obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look at them; but she
had acted, she was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion, and so
made herself work for confession and penance. Yet certainly she had not
meant to do so; the interview came on her so suddenly, so unexpectedly;
and somehow he _would_ speak, and he would not go when she asked him to;
and she remembered how he looked when he stood right before her in the
doorway and told her she _should_ hear him,--how the color flushed up in
his cheeks, what a fire there was in his great dark eyes; he looked as if
he were going to do something desperate then; it made her hold her breath
even now to think of it.
"These princes and nobles," she thought, "are so used to command, it is no
wonder they make us feel as if they must have their will. I have heard
grandmother call them wolves and vultures, that are ready to tear us poor
folk to pieces; but I am sure he seems gentle. I'm sure it isn't wicked or
cruel for him to want to make me his wife; and he couldn't know, of
course, why it wasn't right he should; and it really is beautiful of him
to love me so. Oh, if I were only a princess, and he loved me that way,
how glad I should be to give up everything and go to him alone! And then
we would pray together; and I really think that would be much better than
praying all alone. He said men had so much more to tempt them. Ah, that is
true! How can little moles that grub in the ground know of the dangers of
eagles that fly to the very sun? Holy Mother, look mercifully upon him and
save his soul!"
Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was preparing for her
confession; and all the way to church she found them floating and
dissolving and reappearing in new forms in her mind, like the silvery
smoke-clouds which were constantly veering and sailing over Vesuvius.
Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that was the purpose to
reveal everything to her spiritual director. When she kneeled at the
confessional with closed eyes, and began her whispered acknowledgments,
she tried to feel as if she were speaking in the ear of God alone,--that
God whose spirit she was taught to believe, for the time being, was
present in His minister before whom her inmost heart was to be unveiled.
He who sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind
and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,--a sort of ecstatic clearness
and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely
days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded
only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many
phases of strange, unnatural experience as there were flitting
smoke-wreaths eddying about him.
There are depths in man's nature and his possibilities which no plummet
has ever sounded,--the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the
perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time,
to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can
we understand the facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, of
those men and women who have found such strange raptures in slow tortures,
prolonged from year to year, till pain became a habit of body and mind? It
is said, that, after the tortures of the rack, the reaction of the
overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most exquisite relief and
repose; and so when mind and body are harrowed, harassed to the very outer
verge of endurance, come wild throbbings and transports, and strange
celestial clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the New
Jerusalem into his soul.
It had seemed to Father Francesco, when he came down from the mountain,
that he had left his body behind him,--that he had left earth and earthly
things; his very feet touching the ground seemed to tread not on rough,
resisting soil, but upon elastic cloud. He saw a strange excess of beauty
in every flower, in every leaf, in the wavering blue of the sea, in the
red grottoed rocks that overhung the shore, with their purple, green,
orange, and yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf-tapestry. The songs of the
fishermen on the beach, the peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder for the
cattle, all seemed to him to have an unnatural charm. As one looking
through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on every object, so he
beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed to him something forever
past and gone. He looked at himself as at another person, who had sinned
and suffered, and was now resting in beatified repose; and he fondly
thought all this was firm reality, and believed that he was now proof
against all earthly impressions, able to hear and to judge with the
dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not know that this
high-strung calmness, this fine clearness, were only the most intense form
of nervous sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to every mortal
impression as is the vitalized chemical plate to the least action of the
sun's rays.
When Agnes began her confession, her voice seemed to him to pass through
every nerve; it seemed as if he could feel her presence thrilling through
the very wood of the confessional. He was astonished and dismayed at his
own emotion. But when she began to speak of the interview with the
cavalier, he trembled from head to foot with uncontrollable passion.
Nature long repressed came back in a tempestuous reaction. He crossed
himself again and again, he tried to pray, and blessed those protecting
shadows which concealed his emotion from the unconscious one by his side.
But he set his teeth in deadly resolve, and his voice, as he questioned
her, came forth cutting and cold as ice crystals.
"Why did you listen to a word?"
"My father, it was so sudden. He wakened me from sleep. I answered him
before I thought."
"You should not have been sleeping. It was a sinful indolence."
"Yes, my father."
"See now to what it led. The enemy of your soul, ever watching, seized
this moment to tempt you."
"Yes, my father."
"Examine your soul well," said Father Francesco, in a tone of austere
severity that made Agnes tremble. "Did you not find a secret pleasure in
his words?"
"My father, I fear I did," said she, with a trembling voice.
"I knew it! I knew it!" the priest muttered to himself, while the great
drops started on his forehead, in the intensity of the conflict he
repressed. Agnes thought the solemn pause that followed was caused by the
horror that had been inspired by her own sinfulness.
"You did not, then, heartily and truly wish him to go from you?" pursued
the cold, severe voice.
"Yes, my father, I did. I wished him to go with all my soul."
"Yet you say you found pleasure in his being near you," said Father
Francesco, conscious how every string of his own being, even in this awful
hour, was vibrating with a sort of desperate, miserable joy in being once
more near to her.
"Ah," sighed Agnes, "that is true, my father,--woe is me! Please tell me
how I could have helped it. I was pleased before I knew it."
"And you have been thinking of what he said to you with pleasure since?"
pursued the confessor, with an intense severity of manner, deepening as he
spoke.
"I _have_ thought of it," faltered Agnes.
"Beware how you trifle with the holy sacrament! Answer frankly. You have
thought of it with _pleasure_. Confess it."
"I do not understand myself exactly," said Agnes. "I have thought of it
partly with pleasure and partly with pain."
"Would you like to go with him and be his wife, as he said?"
"If it were right, father,--not otherwise."
"Oh, foolish child! oh, blinded soul! to think of right in connection with
an infidel and heretic! Do you not see that all this is an artifice of
Satan? He can transform himself into an angel of light. Do you suppose
this heretic would be brought back to the Church by a foolish girl? Do you
suppose it is your prayers he wants? Why does, he not seek the prayers of
the Church,--of holy men who have power with God? He would bait his hook
with this pretence that he may catch your soul. Do you believe me?"
"I am bound to believe you, my father."
"But you do not. Your heart is going after this wicked man."
"Oh, my father, I do not wish it should. I never wish or expect to see him
more. I only pray for him that his soul may not be lost."
"He has gone, then?"
"Yes, my father. And he went with my uncle, a most holy monk, who has
undertaken the work of his salvation. He listens to my uncle, who has
hopes of restoring him to the Church."
"That is well. And now, my daughter, listen to me. You must root out of
your thought every trace and remembrance of these words of sinful earthly
love which he hath spoken. Such love would burn your soul to all eternity
with fire that never could be quenched. If you can tear away all roots and
traces of this from your heart, if by fasting and prayer and penance you
can become worthy to be a bride of your divine Lord, then your prayers
will gain power, and you may prevail to secure his eternal salvation. But
listen to me, daughter,--listen and tremble! If ever you should yield to
his love and turn back from this heavenly marriage to follow him, you will
accomplish his damnation and your own; to all eternity he will curse you,
while the fire rages and consumes him,--he will curse the hour that he
first saw you."
These words were spoken with an intense vehemence which seemed almost
supernatural. Agnes shivered and trembled; a vague feeling of guilt
overwhelmed and disheartened her; she seemed to herself the most lost and
abandoned of human beings.
"My father, I shall think no penance too severe that may restore my soul
from this sin. I have already made a vow to the blessed Mother that I will
walk on foot to the Holy City, praying in every shrine and holy place; and
I humbly ask your approval."
This announcement brought to the mind of the monk a sense of relief and
deliverance. He felt already, in the terrible storm of agitation which
this confession had aroused within him, that nature was not dead, and that
he was infinitely farther from the victory of passionless calm than he had
supposed. He was still a man,--torn with human passions, with a love which
he must never express, and a jealousy which burned and writhed at every
word which he had wrung from its unconscious object. Conscience had begun
to whisper in his ear that there would be no safety to him in continuing
this spiritual dictatorship to one whose every word unmanned him,--that it
was laying himself open to a ceaseless temptation, which in some blinded,
dreary hour of evil might hurry him into acts of horrible sacrilege; and
he was once more feeling that wild, stormy revolt of his inner nature that
so distressed him before he left the convent.
This proposition of Agnes' struck him as a compromise. It would take her
from him only for a season, she would go under his care and direction, and
he would gradually recover his calmness and self-possession in her
absence. Her pilgrimage to the holy places would be a most proper and fit
preparation for the solemn marriage-rite which should forever sunder her
from all human ties and make her inaccessible to all solicitations of
human love. Therefore, after an interval of silence, he answered,--
"Daughter, your plan is approved. Such pilgrimages have ever been held
meritorious works in the Church, and there is a special blessing upon
them."
"My father," said Agnes, "it has always been in my heart from my childhood
to be the bride of the Lord; but my grandmother, who brought me up, and to
whom I owe the obedience of a daughter, utterly forbids me: she will not
hear a word of it. No longer ago than last Monday she told me I might as
well put a knife into her heart as speak of this."
"And you, daughter, do you put the feelings of any earthly friend before
the love of your Lord and Creator who laid down His life for you? Hear
what He saith:--'He that loveth father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me.'"
"But my poor old grandmother has no one but me in the world, and she has
never slept a night without me; she is getting old, and she has worked for
me all her good days;--it would be very hard for her to lose me."
"Ah, false, deceitful heart! Has, then, thy Lord not labored for thee? Has
He not borne thee through all the years of thy life? And wilt thou put the
love of any mortal before His?"
"Yes," replied Agnes, with a sort of hardy sweetness,--"but my Lord does
not need me as grandmother does; He is in glory, and will never be old or
feeble; I cannot work for Him and tend Him as I shall her. I cannot see my
way clear at present; but when she is gone, or if the saints move her to
consent, I shall then belong to God alone."
"Daughter, there is some truth in your words; and if your Lord accepts
you, He will dispose her heart. Will she go with you on this pilgrimage?"
"I have prayed that she might, father,--that her soul may be quickened;
for I fear me, dear old grandmamma has found her love for me a snare,--she
has thought too much of my interests and too little of her own soul, poor
grandmamma!"
"Well, child, I shall enjoin this pilgrimage on her as a penance."
"I have grievously offended her lately," said Agnes, "in rejecting an
offer of marriage with a man on whom she had set her heart, and therefore
she does not listen to me as she is wont to do."
"You have done right in refusing, my daughter. I will speak to her of
this, and show her how great is the sin of opposing a holy vocation in a
soul whom the Lord calls to Himself, and enjoin her to make reparation by
uniting with you in this holy work."
Agnes departed from the confessional without even looking upon the face of
her director, who sat within listening to the rustle of her dress as she
rose,--listening to the soft fall of her departing footsteps, and praying
that grace might be given him not to look after her: and he did not,
though he felt as if his life were going with her.
Agnes tripped round the aisle to a little side-chapel where a light was
always kept burning by her before a picture of Saint Agnes, and, kneeling
there, waited till her grandmother should be through with her confession.
"Ah, sweet Saint Agnes," she said, "pity me! I am a poor ignorant young
girl, and have been led into grievous sin; but I did not mean to do
wrong,--I have been trying to do right; pray for me, that I may overcome
as you did. Pray our dear Lord to send you with us on this pilgrimage, and
save us from all wicked and brutal men who would do us harm. As the Lord
delivered you in sorest straits, keeping soul and body pure as a lily, ah,
pray Him to keep me! I love you dearly,--watch over me and guide me."
In those days of the Church, such addresses to the glorified saints had
become common among all Christians. They were not regarded as worship, any
more than a similar outpouring of confidence to a beloved and revered
friend yet in the body. Among the hymns of Savonarola is one addressed to
Saint Mary Magdalen, whom he regarded with an especial veneration. The
great truth, that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, that
_all_ live to Him, was in those ages with the truly religious a part of
spiritual consciousness. The saints of the Church Triumphant, having
become one with Christ as he is one with the Father, were regarded as
invested with a portion of his divinity, and as the ministering agency
through which his mediatorial government on earth was conducted; and it
was thought to be in the power of the sympathetic heart to attract them by
the outflow of its affections, so that their presence often overshadowed
the walks of daily life with a cloud of healing and protecting sweetness.
If the enthusiasm of devotion in regard to these invisible friends became
extravagant and took the language due to God alone, it was no more than
the fervid Italian nature was always doing with regard to visible objects
of affection. Love with an Italian always tends to become worship, and
some of the language of the poets addressed to earthly loves rises into
intensities of expression due only to the One, Sovereign, Eternal Beauty.
One sees even in the writings of Cicero that this passionate adoring kind
of love is not confined to modern times. When he loses the daughter in
whom his heart is garnered up, he finds no comfort except in building a
temple to her memory,--a blind outreaching towards the saint-worship of
modern times.
Agnes rose from her devotions, and went with downcast eyes, her lips still
repeating prayers, to the font of holy water, which was in a dim shadowy
corner, where a painted window cast a gold and violet twilight. Suddenly
there was a rustle of garments in the dimness, and a jewelled hand essayed
to pass holy water to her on the tip of its finger. This mark of Christian
fraternity, common in those times, Agnes almost mechanically accepted,
touching her slender finger to the one extended, and making the sign of
the cross, while she raised her eyes to see who stood there. Gradually the
haze cleared from her mind, and she awoke to the consciousness that it was
the cavalier! He moved to come towards her, with a bright smile on his
face; but suddenly she became pale as one who has seen a spectre, and,
pushing from her with both hands, she said faintly, "Go, go!" and turned
and sped up the aisle silently as a sunbeam, joining her grandmother, who
was coming from the confessional with a gloomy and sullen brow.
Old Elsie had been enjoined to unite with her grandchild in this scheme of
a pilgrimage, and received the direction with as much internal contumacy
as would a thriving church-member of Wall Street a proposition to attend a
protracted meeting in the height of the business season. Not but that
pilgrimages were holy and gracious works,--she was too good a Christian
not to admit that,--but why must holy and gracious works be thrust on her
in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and people
_could_ get to heaven without,--if not with a very abundant entrance,
still in a modest way,--and Elsie's ambition for position and treasure in
the spiritual world was of a very moderate cast.
"Well, now, I hope you are satisfied," she said to Agnes, as she pulled
her along with no very gentle hand; "you've got me sent off on a
pilgrimage,--and my old bones must be rattling up and down all the hills
between here and Rome,--and who's to see to the oranges?--they'll all be
stolen, every one."
"Grandmother," began Agnes in a pleading voice--
"Oh, you hush up! I know what you're going to say: 'The good Lord will
take care of them.' I wish He may! He has His hands full, with all the
people that go cawing and psalm-singing like so many crows, and leave all
their affairs to Him!"
Agnes walked along disconsolate, with her eyes full of tears, which
coursed one another down her pale cheeks.
"There's Antonio," pursued Elsie, "would perhaps look after things a
little. He is a good fellow, and only yesterday was asking if he couldn't
do something for us. It's you he does it for,--but little you care who
loves you, or what they do for you!"
At this moment they met old Jocunda, whom we have before introduced to the
reader as portress of the Convent. She had on her arm a large square
basket, which she was storing for its practical uses.
"Well, well, Saint Agnes be praised, I have found you at last," she said.
"I was wanting to speak about some of your blood-oranges for conserving.
An order has come down from our dear gracious lady, the Queen, to prepare
a lot for her own blessed eating, and you may be sure I would get none of
anybody but you.--But what's this, my little heart, my little
lamb?--crying?--tears in those sweet eyes? What's the matter now?"
"Matter enough for me!" said Elsie. "It's a weary world we live in. A body
can't turn any way and not meet with trouble. If a body brings up a girl
one way, why, every fellow is after her, and one has no peace; and if a
body brings her up another way, she gets her head in the clouds, and
there's no good of her in this world. Now look at that girl,--doesn't
everybody say it's time she were married?--but no marrying for her!
Nothing will do but we must off to Rome on a pilgrimage,--and what's the
good of that, I want to know? If it's praying that's to be done, the dear
saints know she's at it from morning till night,--and lately she's up and
down three or four times a night with some prayer or other."
"Well, well," said Jocunda, "who started this idea?"
"Oh, Father Francesco and she got it up between them,--and nothing will do
but I must go, too."
"Well, now, after all, my dear," said Jocunda, "do you know, I made a
pilgrimage once, and it isn't so bad. One gets a good deal by it, first
and last. Everybody drops something into your hand as you go, and one gets
treated as if one were somebody a little above the common; and then in
Rome one has a princess or a duchess or some noble lady who washes one's
feet, and gives one a good supper, and perhaps a new suit of clothes, and
all that,--and ten to one there comes a pretty little sum of money to
boot, if one plays one's cards well. A pilgrimage isn't bad, after
all;--one sees a world of fine things, and something new every day."
"But who is to look after our garden and dress our trees?"
"Ah, now, there's Antonio, and old Meta his mother," said Jocunda, with a
knowing wink at Agnes. "I fancy there are friends there that would lend a
hand to keep things together against the little one comes borne. If one is
going to be married, a pilgrimage brings good luck in the family. All the
saints take it kindly that one comes so far to see them, and are more
ready to do a good turn for one when one needs it. The blessed saints are
like other folks,--they like to be treated with proper attention."
This view of pilgrimages from the material stand-point had more effect on
the mind of Elsie than the most elaborate appeals of Father Francesco. She
began to acquiesce, though with a reluctant air.
Jocunda, seeing her words had made some impression, pursued her advantage
on the spiritual ground.
"To be sure," she added, "I don't know how it is with you; but I know that
_I_ have, one way and another, rolled up quite an account of sins in my
life. When I was tramping up and down with my old man through the
country,--now in this castle and then in that camp, and now and then in at
the sacking of a city or village, or something of the kind,--the saints
forgive us!--it does seem as if one got into things that were not of the
best sort, in such times. It's true, it's been wiped out over and over by
the priest; but then a pilgrimage is a good thing to make all sure, in
case one's good works should fall short of one's sins at last. I can tell
you, a pilgrimage is a good round weight to throw into the scale; and when
it comes to heaven and hell, you know, my dear, why, one cannot be too
careful."
"Well, that may be true enough," said Elsie,--"though, as to my sins, I
have tried to keep them regularly squared up and balanced as I went along.
I have always been regular at confession, and never failed a jot or tittle
in what the holy father told me. But there may be something in what you
say; one can't be too sure; and so I'll e'en school my old bones into
taking this tramp."
That evening, as Agnes was sitting in the garden at sunset, her
grandmother bustling in and out, talking, groaning, and, hurrying in her
preparations for the anticipated undertaking, suddenly there was a
rustling in the branches overhead, and a bouquet of rose-buds fell at her
feet. Agnes picked it up, and saw a scrip of paper coiled among the
flowers. In a moment remembering the apparition of the cavalier in the
church in the morning, she doubted not from whom it came. So dreadful had
been the effect of the scene at the confessional, that the thought of the
near presence of her lover brought only terror. She turned pale; her hands
shook. She shut her eyes, and prayed that she might not be left to read
the paper; and then, summoning all her resolution, she threw the bouquet
with force over the wall. It dropped down, down, down the gloomy, shadowy
abyss, and was lost in the damp caverns below.
The cavalier stood without the wall, waiting for some responsive signal in
reply to his missive. It had never occurred to him that Agnes would not
even read it, and he stood confounded when he saw it thrown back with such
apparent rudeness. He remembered her pale, terrified look on seeing him in
the morning. It was not indifference or dislike, but mortal fear, that had
been shown in that pale face.
"These wretches are practising on her," he said, in wrath,--"filling her
head with frightful images, and torturing her sensitive conscience till
she sees sin in the most natural and innocent feelings."
He had learned from Father Antonio the intention of Agnes to go on a
pilgrimage, and he longed to see and talk with her, that he might offer
her his protection against dangers which he understood far better than
she. It had never even occurred to him that the door for all possible
communication would be thus suddenly barred in his face.
"Very well," he said to himself, with a darkening brow,--"let them have it
their own way here. She must pass through my dominions before she can
reach Rome, and I will find a place where I _can_ be heard, without priest
or grandmother to let or hinder. She is mine, and I will care for her."
But poor Agnes had the woman's share of the misery to bear, in the fear
and self-reproach and distress which every movement of this kind cost her.
The involuntary thrill at seeing her lover, at hearing from him, the
conscious struggle which it cost her to throw back his gift, were all
noted by her accusing conscience as so many sins. The next day she sought
again her confessor, and began an entrance on those darker and more chilly
paths of penance, by which, according to the opinion of her times, the
peculiarly elect of the Lord were supposed to be best trained. Hitherto
her religion had been the cheerful and natural expression of her tender
and devout nature according to the more beautiful and engaging devotional
forms of her Church. During the year when her confessor had been,
unconsciously to himself, led by her instead of leading, her spiritual
food had been its beautiful old hymns and prayers, which she found no
weariness in often repeating. But now an unnatural conflict was begun in
her mind, directed by a spiritual guide in whom every natural and normal
movement of the soul had given way before a succession of morbid and
unhealthful experiences. From that day Agnes wore upon her heart one of
those sharp instruments of torture which in those times were supposed to
be a means of inward grace,--a cross with seven steel points for the seven
sorrows of Mary. She fasted with a severity which alarmed her grandmother,
who in her inmost heart cursed the day that ever she had placed her in the
way of saintship.
"All this will just end in spoiling her beauty,--making her as thin as a
shadow,"--said Elsie; "and she was good enough before."
But it did not spoil her beauty,-it only changed its character. The
roundness and bloom melted away,--but there came in their stead that
solemn, transparent clearness of countenance, that spiritual light and
radiance, which the old Florentine painters gave to their Madonnas.
It is singular how all religious exercises and appliances take the
character of the nature that uses them. The pain and penance, which so
many in her day bore as a cowardly expedient for averting divine wrath,
seemed, as she viewed them, a humble way of becoming associated in the
sufferings of her Redeemer. "_Jesu dulcis memoria_," was the thought that
carried a redeeming sweetness with every pain. Could she thus, by
suffering with her Lord, gain power like Him to save,--a power which
should save that soul so dear and so endangered! "Ah," she thought, "I
would give my life-blood, drop by drop, if only it might avail for his
salvation!"
* * * * *
THE TRUE HEROINE.
What was she like? I cannot tell.
I only know God loved her well.
Two noble sons her gray hairs blest,--
And he, their sire, was now at rest.
And why her children loved her so,
And called her blessed, all shall know:
She never had a selfish thought,
Nor valued what her hand had wrought.
She could be just in spite of love;
And cherished hates she dwelt above;
In sick-rooms they that had her care
Said she was wondrous gentle there.
It was a fearful trust, she knew,
To guide her young immortals through;
But Love and Truth explained the way,
And Piety made perfect day.
She taught them to be pure and true,
And brave, and strong, and courteous, too;
She made them reverence silver hairs,
And feel the poor man's biting cares.
She won them ever to her side;
_Home_ was their treasure and their pride:
Its food, drink, shelter pleased them best,
And there they found the sweetest rest.
And often, as the shadows fell,
And twilight had attuned them well,
She sang of many a noble deed,
And marked with joy their eager heed.
And most she marked their kindling eyes
When telling of the victories
That made the Stars and Stripes a name,
Their country rich in honest fame.
It was a noble land, she said,--
Its poorest children lacked not bread;
It was so broad, so rich, so free,
They sang its praise beyond the sea;
And thousands sought its kindly shore,
And none were poor and friendless more;
All blessed the name of Washington,
And loved the Union, every one.
She made them feel that they were part
Of a great nation's living heart.--
So they grew up, true patriot boys,
And knew not all their mother's joys.
Sad was the hour when murmurs loud
From a great black advancing cloud
Made millions feel the coming breath
Of maddened whirlwinds, full of death!
She prayed the skies might soon be bright,
And made her sons prepare for fight
Brave youths!--their zeal proved clearly then
In such an hour youths can be men!
By day she went from door to door,--
Men caught her soul, unfelt before;
By night she prayed, and planned, and dreamed,
Till morn's red light war's lightning seemed.
The cry went forth; forth stepped her sons
In martial blaze of gleaming guns:
Still striding on to perils dire,
They turned to catch her glance of fire.
No fears, no fond regrets she knew,
But proudly watched them fade from view:
"Lord, keep them so!" she said, and turned
To where her lonely hearth-fire burned.
* * * * *
JEFFERSON AND SLAVERY.
Any one who feels deeply the truths in which our great men of old founded
this Democracy, and who sees clearly the great lines of political
architecture by which alone it shall stand firm or rise high, finds in the
direct plan and work the agency mainly of six men.
These may be set in three groups.
_First_, three men, who, through a series of earnest thoughts, taking
shape sometimes in apt words, sometimes in bold acts, did most to _found_
the Republic: and these three are Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.
_Secondly_, two men, who, as statesmen, by a healthful division between
the two great natural policies, and, as politicians, by a healthful
antagonism between the two great natural parties, did most to _build_ the
Republic: and these two are Jefferson and Hamilton.
_Thirdly_, three men, who, having a clear theory in their heads, and a
deep conviction in their hearts, working on the nation by sermons,
epistles, programmes, hints, quips, innuendoes, by every form of winged
word, have done most to get this people into simple trains of humanitarian
thought, and have therefore done most to _brace_ the Republic: and these
three men are Franklin, Jefferson, and Channing.
So, rising above the dust raised in our old quarrels, and taking a broad
view over this Democracy, we see Jefferson firmly placed in each of these
groups.
If we search in Jefferson's writings and in the contemporary records to
ascertain what that power was which won him these positions, we find that
it was no personal skill in cajoling friends or scaring enemies. No
sound-hearted man ever rose from talk with him with a tithe of the
veneration felt by those who sat at the feet of Washington or Hamilton or
Channing. Neither was his position due to oratory: he could deal neither
in sweet words nor in lofty words. Yet, in spite of these wants, he
wrought on the nation with immense power.
The real secret of this power was, first of all, that Jefferson saw
infinitely deeper into the principles of the rising Democracy, and
infinitely farther into its future working, than any other man of his
time. Those who earnestly read him will often halt astounded at proofs of
a foresight in him almost miraculous. Even in masses of what men have
called his puerility there are often germs of immense worth,--taking
years, perhaps, to show life, but sure to be alive at last.
Take, as the latest examples of this, three germ-truths which have
recently come to full life, after having been trodden under foot for fifty
years.
Early in our national life Jefferson declared against the usurpations of
the national judiciary. Straightway his supporters were divided, mainly
between those who sorrowed and those who stood silent; while his opponents
were divided only between those who laughed and those who cursed. But who
laughs now? Jefferson foresaw but too well. The usurpations of the
national judiciary have come in shapes most hideous,--in the _obiter
dicta_ of the Dred Scott decision, and in the use of quibbles to entangle
our defenders and set loose our traitors.
Take an example of another kind. In his early career Jefferson gave forth
a scheme of harbor-defence by gun-boats and floating batteries. This was
partially carried out, and only partially; so it failed. On these
gun-boats and batteries his enemies never tired of trying their wit, and
certainly seemed to make a brilliant point against his foresight and
economy. But, in these latter years, many Americans besides ourself,
visiting Cronstadt during the blockade by the Allied fleet, saw not only
how the Allies failed of a conquest, the first summer, for want of
gun-boats, but how the Russians protected themselves greatly, during the
second summer, by means of them. We were shown, too, that not only could
good work be done by those driven by steam, but that the greater number
driven by oarsmen were of much service, not only in vexing the enemy, but
in protecting the whole exposed coast. Here was Jefferson's scheme to the
letter. Here was a despised thought of the past become a proud fact of the
present. Here had the Autocrat reared a monument to our great
Democrat,--gaining praise for Jefferson long after his enemies and their
factious laughter had died out forever.
But take what the main body of cultured Americans have thought Jefferson's
chronic whimsey,--his belief that the heart of England must be ever set
against all our liberty and prosperity. As we now breast the terrific
storm which English reasonings and taunts had encouraged us to brave, and
hear, swelling above the faint English God-speed, misstatements, gibes,
reproofs, malignant prophecies, who of us shall say that the English
character and policy of 1861 were not better foreknown by Jefferson in
1820 than by ourselves In 1860?
So much for Jefferson's insight and foresight. But there was yet a greater
quality which gave him a place in each of these three great groups,--his
faith in Democracy.
At a time when the French Revolution had scared even Burke, and when the
British Constitution was thought by many to have seduced even Washington,
Jefferson held fast to his great faith in the rights and capacities of the
people. The only effect on him of the shocks and failures of that period
was to make his anxiety sometimes morbid, and his action sometimes
spasmodic. Hence much that to many men has seemed unjust suspicion of
Adams, and persecution of Hamilton, and disrespect for Washington. Yet all
this was but the jarring of that strong mind in the struggle and crash of
his times,--mere spasms of bigotry which prove the vigor of his faith in
Democracy.
Jefferson, then, known of all men not fettered by provincial traditions as
invested with this foresight and this faith, is become to a vast party an
idol, and from his writings issue oracles. But the priests at his shrines,
having waxed fat in honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments and
wrested his arguments, that thousands of true men regard him sorrowfully
as the promoter of that Slavery-Despotism which to-day blooms in treason.
It is worth our while, therefore, to seek to know whether Jefferson the
god of the Oligarchs is Jefferson the Democrat. Let us, by the simplest
and fairest process possible, try to come at his real opinions on
Slavery,--just as they grew when he did so much to found the
Republic,--just as they flourished when he did so much to build the
Republic,--just as they were re-wrought and polished when he did so much
to brace the Republic.
The whole culture of Jefferson's youth was, of all things in the world,
least likely to make him support slavery or apologize for it. The man who
did most to work into his mind ideas of moral and political science was
Dr. William Small, a liberal Scotchman; the man who did most to direct his
studies in law, and his grappling with social problems, was George Wythe.
To both of these Jefferson confessed the deepest debt for their efforts to
strengthen his mind and make his footing firm. Now, of all men in this
country at that time, these two were least likely to support pro-slavery
theories or tolerate pro-slavery cant. For while to Small's soundness
there is abundance of general testimony, there is to Wythe's soundness
testimony the most pointed. We have but to take the first volume of
Jefferson's Works, published by order of Congress, and we find Jefferson's
anti-slavery letter to Dr. Price, written in 1785, urging the Doctor to
work against pro-slavery ideas in the young men, and to exhort the young
men of Virginia to the "redress of the enormity." Incidentally he speaks
of Mr. Wythe as already doing great good in this direction among these
same young men, and declares him "one of the most virtuous of characters,
and whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are unequivocal."
So much for the _direct_ influences on Jefferson's early culture.
Studying, next, the _indirect_ influences on his early culture, we see
that the reform literature of that time was coming almost entirely from
France. Active, earnest men everywhere were grasping the theories and
phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu, to wield them against
every tyranny. Terrible weapons these,--often searing and scarring
frightfully those who brandished them,--yet there was not one chance in a
thousand that any man who had once made any considerable number of these
ideas his own could ever support slavery. Whoever, at that time, studied
the "Contrat Social," or the defence of Jean Calas, whatever other sins he
might commit, was no more likely to advocate systematic oppression than
are they who now read with reverence Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley; and
whoever, at that time, read earnestly "The Spirit of the Laws" was as sure
to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or Theodore
Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light into Jefferson's
young mind, that every filthy weed of tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery
paradox must have been shrivelled.
And the young statesman grew under this influence as we should expect. In
his twenty-seventh year he sat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and his
first effort in legislation was, in his own words, "an effort for the
permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected, and, indeed,
during the regal government nothing liberal could expect success." His
whole career in those years, whether as public man or private man, shows
that his hatred of slavery was bitter. But there was such a press of other
work during this founding period, that this hatred took shape not so much
in a steady siege as in a series of pitched battles. The work to be done
was immense, and Jefferson bore the bulk of it. He took upon himself
one-third of the revising and codifying of the Virginia laws, and did even
more than this. He undertook, in his own words, "a distinct series of
labors which formed _a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of
ancient or future aristocracy_." He effected the repeal of the laws of
entail, and this prevented an aristocratic absorption of the soil; he
effected the abolition of primogeniture, and this destroyed all chance of
rebuilding feudal families; he effected a restoration of the rights of
conscience, and this overthrew all hope of an Established Church; he
forced on the bill for general education,--for thus, he said, would the
people be "qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to
exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government." In all this
work his keen common sense always cut his way through questions at which
other men stopped or stumbled. Thus, in the discussion on primogeniture,
when Isaac Pendleton proposed, as a compromise, that they should adopt the
Hebrew principle and give a double portion to the eldest son, Jefferson
cut at once into the heart of the question. As he himself relates,--"I
observed, that, if the eldest son could eat twice as much, or do double
work, it might be a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but
being on a par in his powers and wants with his brothers and sisters, he
should be on a par also in the partition of the patrimony. And such was
the decision of the other members."
But such fierceness against the bulwarks of aristocracy, and such keenness
in cutting through its heavy arguments, carried him farther. Logic forced
him to pass from the attack on aristocracy to the attack on slavery, just
as logic forces the Confederate oligarchs of to-day to pass from the
defence of slavery to the defence of aristocracy. He was sure to fight
this vilest of tyrannies, and he gave quick thrusts and heavy blows. In
1778 he brought in a bill to prevent the further importation of slaves
into Virginia. "This," he says, "passed without opposition, and stopped
the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its
final eradication." Years afterward he wrote as follows:--"I have
sometimes asked myself whether my country is better for my having lived at
all: I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the
following things." Of these things there were just ten. Just ten great
worthy deeds in a life like Jefferson's!--and one of these he declares
"the act prohibiting the importation of slaves."
Close upon this followed a fiercer grapple,--his third great legislative
attack on slavery. In his revision of the Virginia laws he reported "a
bill to emancipate all slaves born after the passing of the act." Attached
to this was a plan for the instruction of the young negroes thus set free.
To follow Jefferson and understand him, we must bear in mind that the
Virginia which educated him was not behind a dozen smaller States in
fertility, enterprise, and republican feeling. Its best men were haters of
slavery. The efforts of its leaders were directed to other things than
plans for taxing oysters or filching the gains of free negroes. Forth from
the Virginia of that time were hurled against negro slavery the thrilling
invectives of Patrick Henry, the startling prophecies of Madison, and the
declaration of Washington, "For the abolition of slavery by law my vote
shall not be wanting."
For a mirror of that Virginia statesmanship, in its dealings with human
rights, take the "Dissertation on Slavery with a Proposal for the Gradual
Abolition of it in the State of Virginia, written by St. George Tucker,
Professor of Law in the University of William and Mary, and one of the
Judges of the General Court in Virginia," published in 1791. It proves,
that, between the passage of the act of 1782 allowing manumission and the
year 1791, more than ten thousand slaves had been set free. One is tempted
to believe that the new Massachusetts school caught its fire from this old
Virginia school; for this friend of Jefferson speaks of "the inconsistency
of invoking God for liberty in our Revolution and imposing on our
fellow-men who differ from us in complexion a slavery ten thousand times
more cruel than the grievances and oppressions of which we complained."
Such was the utterance of the Virginia school of statesmanship in which
Jefferson was trained.
And his views progressed, as we should expect. On the occasion of a call
for instructions to the first Virginia delegates to Congress respecting an
address to the King, Jefferson drew up a paper, which, though greatly
admired, was thought too bold. In one passage he goes beyond his masters,
and says,--"For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no
conceivable reasons at all, his Majesty has rejected laws of the most
salutary tendency. _The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object
of desire in these Colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their
infant state._ But, previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have,
it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our
repeated efforts to effect this, by prohibiting and by imposing duties
which might amount to prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his
Majesty's negative,--thus preferring the advantages of a few British
corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States, and to the
rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice."
These words are hot and bright, but they are mere sparkles compared to the
full-flaming orb of freedom which our statesman gave afterward. For, take
the Declaration of Independence, as it issued from Carpenter's Hall, after
slavery-loving planters of the South and money-loving ship-owners of the
North had, as they thought, made it neutral, and we all, North and South,
recognize in it the boldest anti-slavery document extant. Why else do
Northern demagogues ridicule it, and Southern demagogues revile it? Yet
Jefferson made it far stronger and sharper against negro slavery than it
is now. Look closely at the well-known fac-simile:--
[Transcriber's note: in this quotation, _text_ is underlined;
#text# is struck through]
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sac-
-red rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never of-
fended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemis-
-sphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither, this
piratical warfare, the opprobrium of _infidel_ powers, is the warfare of the
_Christian_ king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market
#and#
where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his negative
for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this
#determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold:#
execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact
of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms
among us, and to purchase that liberty of which _he_ has deprived them,
by murdering the people upon whom _he_ also obtruded them: thus paying
off former crimes committed against the _liberties_ of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against the _lives_ of another.]
There stands to this day that precious original,--hot first-thoughts and
cold second-thoughts, all in Jefferson's own hand. Look for a moment at
the rich current of internal evidence running through that rough draught,
and through all its erasures, changes, and emphatic markings,--evidence of
the deepest hatred not only of all tyranny, but of all slavery. Thus,
after he had written the passage, "determined to keep open a market where
MEN should be bought & sold," the idea continues hot in his mind; for,
after smouldering a few moments, it flames forth again, is written again
in the same phrasing, with the same show of emphasis, before he bethinks
himself to erase it. Then, too, the words Christian and MEN are the only
words emphasized by careful pen-printing in large letters;--and this
labored movement of his pen marks the injury which he deemed the greater;
for the largest letters and deepest emphasis are reserved for MEN.
Evidently, that word points out the wrong which, as Jefferson thought, "a
candid world" would forever regard as the supreme wrong.
We have now noted Jefferson's battle against slavery in the founding of
the Republic: let us go on to his work in the building of the Republic.
In 1782 he gave forth the "Notes on Virginia." His opposition to slavery
is as fierce here as of old, but it takes various phases,--sometimes
sweeping against the hated system with a torrent of facts,--sometimes
battering it with a hard, cold logic,--sometimes piercing it with deadly
queries and suggestions,--and sometimes, with his blazing hate of all
oppression, biting and burning through every pro-slavery theory.
But in taking up the "Notes," we must understand the relation of
Jefferson's way of thinking to his way of working. In his thinking, the
slave system was evidently a violation of the whole body of good
principles, for he calls it an "_evil_";--a violation of morality, for he
calls it an "_enormity_";--a violation of justice, for he calls it a
"_wrong_";--a violation of republican pretensions, for he calls it a
"_hideous blot_";--a violation of the healthy action of our institutions,
for he calls it a "_disease_";--a violation of our whole public happiness,
for he calls it a "_curse_." But his way of working was more calm and
cool,--often displeasing those whose plans of action are formed far from
any direct entanglement in the slave system.
This union of fervent thought and cool action has, of course, brought upon
Jefferson the invectives of two great classes. One class have looked
merely at his thinking, and have distrusted him as a dreamer. To these he
is a dealer in oracles, at second-hand, from Voltaire and Diderot. The
other class have studied his plans of practical philanthropy, with all his
shrewd researches and homely discussions in agriculture, finance,
mechanics, and architecture, and have ridiculed him as a tinker. To such
Jefferson seems a grandmotherly sort of person,--riding about in a gig
arranged to register the length of his rides,--walking about in boots
arranged to register the length of his walks,--weatherwise, and profound
in dealing with smoky chimneys and sheep-breeding.
But whether men have cavilled at him for a dreamer or laughed at him for a
tinker, they have been mainly foolish, for they have cavilled and laughed
at the very combination which made him powerful. In no other American have
been so happily blended highest skill in theory and highest strength in
practice.
The remarks, in the "Notes on Virginia," on the colored race are clear and
fair. He studied carefully and stated fully all that could be learned in
his time. On the whole, his examination greatly encourages those who hope
good things for that race. But one distinction must be made. As to those
profound views of the character and destiny of the race which come only by
observation of a long historic development, in a wide range of climate, in
great variety of social position, Jefferson could, as he confesses, know
almost nothing,--for the same reason that the keenest observer of William
the Conqueror's Norman robbers and Saxon swineherds would have failed to
foretell the great dominant race which has come from them by free growth
and good culture. But, on the other hand, of all that comes by observation
of the daily life of the black race, as it then was, he knew almost
everything.
He declares that the black race is inferior to the white in mind, but not
in heart. The poems of black Phillis Wheatley seem to him to prove not
much; but the letters of black Ignatius Sancho he praises for depth of
feeling, happy turn of thought, and ease of style, though he finds no
depth of reasoning. He does not praise the mental capacity of the race,
but, at last, as if conscious, that, if developed under a free system, it
might be far better, he quotes the Homeric lines,--
"Jove fixed it certain that whatever day
Makes man a slave takes half his worth away."
And shortly after, he declares it "a _suspicion_ only that the blacks are
inferior in the endowments of body or mind,"--that "in memory they are
equal to the whites,"--that "in music they are more generally gifted than
the whites with accurate ears for time and tune."
But there is one statement which we especially commend to those in search
of an effective military policy in the present crisis. Jefferson declares
of the negroes, that they are "at least as brave as the whites, and more
adventuresome." May not this truth account for the fact that one of the
most daring deeds in the present war was done by a black man?
Still later, Jefferson says,--"Whether further observation will or will
not verify the conjecture that Nature has been less bountiful to them in
the endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will
be found to have done them justice. That disposition to theft with which
they have been branded must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any
depravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of property
exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of
others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that
laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right,--that, without this,
they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in
conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve,
whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not
framed for him as well as his slave,--and whether the slave may not as
justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him as he may
slay one who would slay him. That a change in the relations in which a man
is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong is neither new,
nor peculiar to the color of the blacks."
Here Jefferson puts forth that very idea for which Gerrit Smith, a few
years ago, was threatened with the penalties of treason.
But to quote further from the same source:--
"Notwithstanding these considerations, which must weaken their
respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous
instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their
instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken
fidelity. The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of
reason and imagination must be hazarded with great diffidence."
The old hot thought blazes forth again in the chapter on "Particular
Manners and Customs." Can men speak against the proclamations of Abolition
Conventions after such fiery words from Jefferson?
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting
despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other.
Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an
imitative animal. If a parent could find no motive either in his
philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of
passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one
that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The
parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of
wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves,
gives a loose rein to the worst of passions, and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by
its odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain
his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." (Here
fire begins to flicker up around the words.) "And with what
execration should a statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half
the _citizens_" (note the word) "to trample on the _rights_" (note
the word) "of the other, transforms those into despots and these
into enemies, destroys the morals of the one and the _amor
patriae_ of the other! And can the liberties of a nation be
thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis,--a
conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the
gifts of God, that they are not to be violated but with His
wrath?" (Now bursts forth prophecy. The whole page flames in a
moment.) "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God
is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering
numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel
of Fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events;
that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The
Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a
contest."
Well may Jefferson say, immediately after this, that "it is impossible to
be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations
of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil." For no Abolitionist
ever branded the slave-system with words more fiery.
In 1784 Jefferson drew up the ordinance for the government of the Western
Territory. One famous clause runs thus:--
"After the year 1800 of the Christian era there shall be neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States,
otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall
have been convicted to be personally guilty."
In Randall's "Life of Jefferson," a work in many respects admirable, this
clause is glossed with the declaration that Jefferson intended merely to
prevent an immense new importation of slaves from Africa to fill the
Territory; but Mr. Randall would have shown far greater insight, had he
added to this half-truth, that the idea of legally grasping and strangling
this curse flows from the ideas of the "Notes" as hot metal flows from
fiery furnace,--that the Ordinance of 1784 was but a minting of that true
metal drawn from those old glowing thoughts and words.
But Jefferson's hatred of slavery is not less fierce in his letters.
Dr. Price writes a pamphlet in England against slavery, and straightway
Jefferson seizes his pen to urge him to write more, and more clearly for
America, and more directly at American young men, saying, in
encouragement,--"Northward of the Chesapeake you may find, here and there,
an opponent to your doctrine, as you may find, here and there, a
murderer." He speaks hopefully of the disposition in Virginia to "redress
this enormity,"--calls the fight against slavery "the interesting
spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression,"--speaks of
the side hostile to slavery as "the sacred side." The date is 1785.
This welcome to Dr. Price's onslaught will serve as antidote to Mr.
Randall's poisonous declaration, that Jefferson was opposed to
interference with slave institutions by those living outside of Slave
States.
In 1786 Jefferson wrote to correct M. de Meusnier's statement of the
efforts already made for emancipation; and, referring to the holding of
slaves by a people who had clamored loudly and fought bravely for freedom,
he says,--
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,--who
can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself,
in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be
deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his
trial, and inflict on his fellow-men _a bondage one hour of which
is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in
rebellion to oppose_!"
Here, in Jefferson himself, then, is the source of that venom with which
earnest men, throughout the land, are stinging to death the organization
which stole his name to destroy his ideas.
In 1788, Jefferson, being Minister at Paris, receives a note from M. de
Warville tendering him membership in the Society for the Abolition of the
Slave-Trade. Jefferson is forced by his peculiar position to decline, but
he takes pains to say,--"You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see
an abolition not only of the trade, but of the _condition_ of slavery."
Here is no non-committalism, no wistful casting about for loop-holes, no
sly putting out of hooks to catch backers, not the feeblest germ of
quibble or lie. The man answers more than he is asked. Is there not, in
the present dearth, something refreshing in this old candor?
But some have thought Jefferson's later expressions against slavery
wanting in heartiness. Let us examine.
The whole world knows, that, when a wrong stings a man, making him fierce
and loud, his _direct_ expressions have often small value; but that his
_parenthetical_ expressions often have great value. This is one of the
simplest principles in homely every-day criticism, serving truth-seekers,
wherever wordy war rages, whether among statesmen or hackmen.
Now, in Jefferson's letter to Dr. Gordon,--written in 1788,--he is greatly
stirred by his own recital of the shameful ravages on his property by the
British army. Just at the moment when his indignation was at the hottest,
there shot out of his heart, and off his pen, one of these side-thoughts,
one of these fragments of the man's ground-idea, which, at such moments,
truth-seekers always watch for. Jefferson says of Cornwallis,--
"He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco; he burned
all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having
first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected,
all my stock of cattle, sheep, and hogs, for the sustenance of his
army, and carried off all the horses capable of service,--of those
too young for service he cut the throats; and he burned all the
fences in the plantation, so as to make it an absolute waste. _He
carried off also about thirty slaves. Had this been to give them
their freedom, he would have done right_."
But we turn to a seeming discrepancy between these thousand earnest
declarations of Jefferson the private citizen, and the cold, formal tone
of Jefferson the Secretary of State. In this high office he reclaims
slaves from the Spanish power in Florida, and demands compensation for
slaves carried off by the British at the evacuation of New York. For a
moment that transition from personal warmth to diplomatic coolness is as
the Russian plunge from steam-bath to snow-heap.
Yet, if truth-seekers do not stop to moan, they may easily find a complete
explanation. As private citizen, in a State, dealing with his home
Government, Jefferson had the right to move heaven and earth against
slavery, and bravely he did it; but, as public servant of the nation,
dealing with foreign Governments, his rights and duties were different,
and his tone must be different. As a private person, writing for man as
man, Jefferson forgot readily enough all differences of nation. He wrote
as readily and fully of the hideousness of slavery to Meusnier and
Warville in France, or to Price and Priestley in England, as to any of his
neighbors; but, as public servant of the nation, writing to Hammond or
Viar, representatives of foreign powers, he made no apology for our
miseries. England might be ready enough to act the part of Dives, but
Jefferson was not the statesman to put America in the attitude of
Lazarus,--begging, and showing sores.
But we have to note yet another change in Jefferson's modes of work and
warfare.
As he wrought and fought in this second period, which, for easy reference,
we call the building period, he was forced into new methods. In the former
period we saw him thinking and speaking and working against every effort
to found pro-slavery theories or practices. Eagerness was then the best
quality for work, and quickness the best quality for fight. But now the
case was different. An institution which Jefferson hated had, in spite of
his struggles, been firmly founded. The land was full of the towers of the
slave aristocracy. He saw that his mode of warfare must be changed. His
old way did well in the earlier days, for tower-builders may be driven
from their work by a sweeping charge or sudden volley; but towers, when
built, must be treated with steady battering and skilful mining.
In 1797, Jefferson, writing to St. George Tucker, speaks of the only
possible emancipation as "a compromise between the passions, prejudices,
and real difficulties, which will each have their weight in the
operation." Afterwards, in his letters to Monroe and Rufus King, he
advocates a scheme of colonization to some point not too distant. But let
no man, on this account, claim Jefferson as a supporter of the do-nothing
school of Northern demagogues, or of the mad school of Southern fanatics
who proclaim this ulcerous mass a beauty, and who howl at all who refuse
its infection. For, note, in that same letter to St. George Tucker, the
fervor of the Jeffersonian theory: bitter as Tucker's pamphlet against
slavery was, he says,--"You know my subscription to its doctrines." Note
also the vigor of the Jeffersonian practice: speaking of emancipation, he
says,--"The sooner we put some plan under way, the greater hope there is
that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably to its ultimate effect." And
now bursts forth prophecy again. "_But if something is not done, and soon
done, we shall be the murderers of our own children_." "If we had begun
sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear
ourselves; but every day's delay lessens the time we may take for
emancipation."
Here is no trace of the theory inflicting a present certain evil on a
great white population in order to do a future doubtful good to a smaller
black population. And this has been nowhere better understood than among
the slave oligarchs of his own time. Note one marked example.
In 1801, Jefferson was elected to the Presidency on the thirty-sixth
ballot. Thirty-five times Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina voted
against him. The following year Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, feeling an
itching to specify to Congress his interests in Buncombe and his relations
to the universe, palavered in the usual style, but let out one truth, for
which, as truth-searchers, we thank him. He said,--
"Permit me to state, that, beside the objections common to my
friend from Delaware and myself, there was a strong one which I
felt with peculiar force. It resulted from a firm belief that the
gentleman in question [Jefferson] _held opinions respecting a
certain description of property in my State which, should they
obtain generally, would endanger it_."[4]
[4] Benton's _Abridgment_, Vol. II. p. 636.
We come now to Jefferson's Presidency. In this there was no great chance
to deal an effective blow at slavery; but some have grown bitter over a
story that he favored the schemes to break the slavery-limitation in Ohio.
Such writers have not stopped to consider that it is more probable that a
few Southern members, eager to drum in recruits, falsely claimed the favor
of the President, than that Jefferson broke the slavery-limitation which
he himself planned. Then, too, came the petitions of the abolition
societies against slavery in Louisiana; and Hildreth blames Jefferson for
his slowness to assist; but ought we not here to take some account of the
difficulties of the situation? Ought not some weight to be given to
Jefferson's declaration to Kerchival, that in his administration his
"efforts in relation to peace, slavery, and religious freedom were all in
accordance with Quakerism"?
We pass now to the third great period, in which, as thinker and writer, he
did so much to brace the Republic.
First of all, in this period we see him revising the translation and
arranging the publication of De Tracy's "Commentaire sur l'Esprit des
Lois." He takes endless pains to make its hold firm on America; engages
his old companion in abolitionism, St. George Tucker, to circulate it;
makes it a text-book in the University of Virginia; tells his friend
Cabell to read it, for it is "the best book on government in the world."
Now this "best book on government" is killing to every form of tyranny or
slavery; its arguments pierce all their fallacies and crush all their
sophistries. That famous plea which makes Alison love Austria and Palmer
love Louisiana--the plea that a people can be best educated for freedom
and religion by dwarfing their minds and tying their hands--is, in this
book, shivered by argument and burnt by invective.
As we approach the last years of Jefferson's life we find several letters
of his on slavery. Some have thought them mere heaps of ashes,--poor
remains of the flaming thoughts and words of earlier years. This mistake
is great. Touch the seeming heap of ashes, and those thoughts and words
dart forth, fiery as of old.
In 1814, Edward Coles attacks slavery vigorously, and calls on the great
Democrat to destroy it. Jefferson's approving reply is the complete
summary of his matured views on slavery. Take a few declarations as
specimens.[5]
[5] Randall, Vol. III., Appendix.
"The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor both to the
head and heart of the writer. Mine, on the subject of the slavery
of negroes, have long since been in possession of the public, and
time has only served to give them stronger proof. The love of
justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these
people, and it is a mortal reproach to us that they should have
pleaded so long in vain."
"The hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It
will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our
own minds or by the bloody process of St. Domingo ... is a leaf of
our history not yet turned over."
"As to the method by which this difficult work is to be effected,
if permitted to be done by ourselves, I have seen no proposition
so expedient, on the whole, as that of emancipation of those born
after a given day."
"This enterprise is for the young,--for those who can follow it up
and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my
prayers."
No wonder that this letter of Jefferson to Coles seems to have been
carefully suppressed by Southern editors of the Jeffersonian writings.
Take also the letters to Mr. Barrows and to Dr. Humphreys of 1815-17.
Disappointment is expressed at the want of a more general anti-slavery
feeling among the young men; hope is expressed that "time will soften down
the master and educate the slave"; faith is expressed that slavery will
yield, "because we are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and power of
a Supreme Agent."
Entering now the stormy period of the Missouri Debate, we have one
declaration from Jefferson which, at first, surprises and pains us,--the
opinion given in a letter to Lafayette, that spreading slavery will
"dilute the evil everywhere, and facilitate the means of getting rid of
it." The mistake is gross indeed. To all of us, with the political
knowledge forced upon us by events since Jefferson's death, it seems
atrocious. But unpardonable as such a theory is _now_, was it so _then_?
Jefferson had not before him the experience of these last forty years of
weakness and poverty and barbarism in our new Slave States,--and of that
tenacity of life which slavery shares with so many other noxious growths.
Hastily, then, he broached this opinion. Let it stand; and let the remark
on "geographical lines," and the two or three severe criticisms of
Northern men, wrested from him in the excitement of the Missouri struggle,
be tied to it and given to the Oligarchs. These expressions were drawn
from him in his old age,--in his vexation at unfair attacks,--in his
depression at the approach of poverty,--in his suffering under the
encroachments of disease. Any one of those bold declarations in the vigor
of his manhood will forever efface all memory of them.
The opinion expressed by Jefferson, at the same period, that "the General
Government cannot interfere with slavery in the States," all our parties
now accept--as a _peace_ policy; but if we are forced into an opposite
_war_ policy, let our generals remember Jefferson's declaration as to the
taking of his slaves by Cornwallis: "_Had this been to give them their
freedom, he would have done right_."
But there is one letter which all Northern statesmen should ponder. It
warns them solemnly, for it was written a very short time before
Jefferson's death;--it warns them sharply, for it struck one whom the
North has especially honored. This son of the North had made a well-known
unfortunate speech in Congress, and had sent it to Jefferson. In his
answer the old statesman declares,--
"On the question of the lawfulness of slavery, that is, _of the
right of one man to appropriate to himself the faculties of
another without his consent, I certainly retain my early
opinions_. On that, however, of third persons to interfere between
the parties, and the effect of Constitutional modifications of
that pretension, we are probably nearer together."
There was a blow well dealt,--though at one now greatly honored. We may
refuse the subordinate idea in the letter, but we will glory in that main
confession of political faith, in the last year of Jefferson's life; and
we will not forget that the last of his letters on slavery chastised the
worst sin of Northern statesmanship.
Jefferson, then, in dealing with slavery, was a real political seer and
giver of oracles,--always sure to say _something_; whereas the "leading
men" who in these latter days have usurped his name are neither political
seers nor givers of oracles, but mere political fakirs,--striving, their
lives long, to enter political blessedness by solemnly doing and seeing
and saying--_nothing_.
Jefferson was a true political warrior, and his battle for human rights
compares with the Oligarchist battle against them as the warfare of Cortés
compares with Aztec warfare. He is the man full of strong thought backed
by civilization: they, the men trying to keep up their faith in idols,
trying to scare with war-paint, trying to startle with war-whoop, trying
to vex with showers of poor Aztec arrows.
Jefferson was an orator,--not in that he fed petty assemblages with
narcotic words to stupefy conscience, or corrosive words to kill
conscience, but in that he gave to the world those decisive, true words
which shall yet pierce all tyranny and slavery.
Jefferson was the founder of a democratic system, strong and full-orbed:
"leading men" have fastened his name to an aristocratic system with
mobocratic cries.
This great tree of Liberty which we are all trying to plant will, of
course, not grow as _we_ will, but as God and Nature will. Some branches
will be exuberant through too great wealth of sunshine,--others gnarled
and awry through too great fury of storms. We need find no fault with any
growth, but we may admire some branches and prize some fruits more than
others. Some grafts set by noblest hands have often blossomed in bad
temper and borne fruit bitter and sour. Some fruitage has been of that
poor Dead-Sea sort,--splendid in coating, but inwardly ashes,--wretched
"protective" schemes and the like. The world may yet see that the limbs of
toughest fibre and fruit of richest flavor have come from grafts set by
just such strong men in theory and in practice as Thomas Jefferson.
* * * * *
A STORY OF TO-DAY.
PART IV.
An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky, opaque, with
yellow trails of color dragging in the west: a sullen stillness in the
woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark, inexplicable hush that precedes
a storm. But Lois, coming down the hill-road, singing to herself, and
keeping time with her whip-end on the wooden measure, stopped when she
grew conscious of it. It seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening
sky: a something solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come. The
dwarf-pines on the road-side scowled weakly at her through the gray; the
very silver minnows in the pools she passed flashed frightened away, and
darkened into the muddy niches. There was a vague dread in the sudden
silence. She called to the old donkey, and went faster down the hill, as
if escaping from some overhanging peril, unseen. She saw Margaret coming
up the road. There was a phaëton behind her, and some horsemen: she jolted
the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes's face in
the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned
towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the
woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid
and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color seemed jeering and mocking
to the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did
not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the
most deadly of shams. As the phaëton went slowly down, Margaret came
nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the
air. Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the
fence, as they met her. Holmes's cold, wandering eye turned on the little
dusty figure standing there, poor and despised. Polston called his eyes
hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray shadow
creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that flashing moment.
The phaëton was gone in an instant, leaving her alone in the muddy road.
One of the men looked back, and then whispered something to the lady with
a laugh. She turned to Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light,
confusing eyes on his face, and softening her voice.
"Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love. Were you, then, so
chivalric? Was it to have been a second romaunt of 'King Cophetua and the
Beggar Maid'?"
He met her look, and saw the fierce demand through the softness and
persiflage. He gave it no answer, but, turning to her, kindled into the
man whom she was so proud to show as her capture,--a man far off from
Stephen Holmes. Brilliant she called him,--frank, winning, generous. She
thought she knew him well; held him a slave to her fluttering hand. Being
proud of her slave, she let the hand flutter down now somehow with some
flowers it held until it touched his hard fingers, her cheek flushing into
rose. The nerveless, spongy hand,--what a death-grip it had on his life!
He did not look back once at the motionless, dusty figure on the road.
What was that Polston had said about starving to death for a kind word?
_Love?_ He was sick of the sickly talk,--crushed it out of his heart with
a savage scorn. He remembered his father, the night he died, had said in
his weak ravings that God was love. Was He? No wonder, then, He was the
God of women, and children, and unsuccessful men. For him, he was done
with it. He was here with stronger purpose than to yield to weaknesses of
the flesh. He had made his choice,--a straight, hard path upwards; he was
deaf now and forever to any word of kindness or pity. As for this woman
beside him, he would be just to her, in justice to himself: she never
should know the loathing in his heart: just to her as to all living
creatures. Some little, mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of bought and
sold,--sold,--but he laughed it down. He sat there with his head steadily
turned towards her: a kingly face, she called it, and she was right,--it
was a kingly face: with the same shallow, fixed smile on his mouth,--no
weary cry went up to God that day so terrible in its pathos, I think: with
the same dull consciousness that this was the trial night of his
life,--that with the homely figure on the road-side he had turned his back
on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and useless
in the world. He had made his choice; he would abide by it,--he would
abide by it. He said that over and over again, dulling down the
death-gnawing of his outraged heart.
Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself, and the
admiring world. She had no notion of trial nights in life. Not many
temptations pierced through her callous, flabby temperament to sting her
to defeat or triumph. There was for her no under-current of conflict, in
these people whom she passed, between self and the unseen power that
Holmes sneered at, whose name was love; they were nothing but movables,
pleasant or ugly to look at, well- or ill-dressed. There were no dark iron
bars across her life for her soul to clutch and shake madly,--nothing "in
the world amiss, to be unriddled by-and-by." Little Margaret, sitting by
the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the clover-roots, while she
looked at the spot where the wheels had passed, looked at life
differently, it may be;--or old Joe Yare by the furnace-fire, his black
face and gray hair bent over a torn old spelling-book Lois had given him.
The night perhaps was going to be more to them than so many rainy hours
for sleeping,--the time to be looked back on through coming lives as the
hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their choice, and, as
Holmes said, did abide by it.
It grew cool and darker. Holmes left the phaëton before they entered town,
and turned back. He was going to see this Margaret Howth, tell her what he
was going to do. Because he was going to leave a clean record. No one
should accuse him of want of honor. This girl alone of all living beings
had a right to see him as he stood, justified to himself. Why she had this
right, I do not think he answered to himself. Besides, he must see her, if
only on business. She must keep her place at the mill: he would not begin
his new life by an act of injustice, taking the bread out of Margaret's
mouth. _Little Margaret!_ He stopped suddenly, looking down into a deep
pool of water by the road-side. What madness of weariness crossed his
brain just then I do not know. He shook it off. Was he mad? Life was worth
more to him than to other men, he thought; and perhaps he was right. He
went slowly through the cool dusk, looking across the fields, up at the
pale, frightened face of the moon hooded in clouds: he did not dare to
look, with all his iron nerve, at the dark figure beyond him on the road.
She was sitting there just where he had left her: be knew she would be.
When he came closer, she got up, not looking towards him; but he saw her
clasp her hands behind her, the fingers plucking weakly at each other. It
was an old, childish fashion of hers, when she was frightened or hurt. It
would only need a word, and he could be quiet and firm,--she was such a
child compared to him: he always had thought of her so. He went on up to
her slowly, and stopped; when she looked at him, he untied the linen
bonnet that hid her face, and threw it back. How thin and tired the little
face had grown! Poor child! He put his strong arm kindly about her, and
stooped to kiss her hand, but she drew it away. God! what did she do that
for? Did not she know that he could put his head beneath her foot then, he
was so mad with pity for the woman he had wronged? Not love, he thought,
controlling himself,--it was only justice to be kind to her.
"You have been ill, Margaret, these two years, while I was gone?"
He could not hear her answer; only saw that she looked up with a white,
pitiful smile. Only a word it needed, he thought,--very kind and firm: and
he must be quick,--he could not bear this long. But he held the little
worn fingers, stroking them with an unutterable tenderness.
"You must let these fingers work for me, Margaret," he said, at last,
"when I am master in the mill."
"It is true, then, Stephen?"
"It is true,--yes."
She lifted her hand to her head, uncertainly: he held it tightly, and then
let it go. What right had he to touch the dust upon her shoes,--he, bought
and sold? She did not speak for a time; when she did, it was a weak and
sick voice.
"I am glad. I saw her, you know. She is very beautiful."
The fingers were plucking at each other again; and a strange, vacant smile
on her face, trying to look glad.
"You love her, Stephen?"
He was quiet and firm enough now.
"I do not. Her money will help me to become what I ought to be. She does
not care for love. You want me to succeed, Margaret? No one ever
understood me as you did, child though you were."
Her whole face glowed.
"I know! I know! I did understand you!"
She said, lower, after a little while,--
"I knew you did not love her."
"There is no such thing as love in real life," he said, in his steeled
voice. "You will know that, when you grow older. I used to believe in it
once, myself."
She did not speak, only watched the slow motion of his lips, not looking
into his eyes,--as she used to do in the old time. Whatever secret account
lay between the souls of this man and woman came out now, and stood bare
on their faces.
"I used to think that I, too, loved," he went on, in his low, hard tone.
"But it kept me back, Margaret, and"--
He was silent.
"I know, Stephen. It kept you back"--
"And I put it away. I put it away to-night, forever."
She did not speak; stood quite quiet, her head bent on her breast. His
conscience was quite clear now. But he almost wished he had not said it,
she was such a weak, sickly thing. She sat down at last, burying her face
in her hands, with a shivering sob. He dared not trust himself to speak
again.
"I am not proud,--as a woman ought to be," she said, wearily, when he
wiped her clammy forehead.
"You loved me, then?" he whispered.
Her face flashed at the unmanly triumph; her puny frame started up, away
from him.
"I did love you, Stephen. I love you now,--as you might be, not as you
are,--not with those cold, inhuman eyes. I do understand you,--I do. I
know you for a better man than you know yourself this night."
She turned to go. He put his hand on her arm; something we have never seen
on his face struggled up,--the better soul that she knew.
"Come back," he said, hoarsely; "don't leave me with myself. Come back,
Margaret."
She did not come; stood leaning, her sudden strength gone, against the
broken wall. There was a heavy silence. The night throbbed slow about
them. Some late bird rose from the sedges of the pool, and with a
frightened cry flapped its tired wings, and drifted into the dark. His
eyes, through the gathering shadow, devoured the weak, trembling body, met
the soul that looked at him, strong as his own. Was it because it knew and
trusted him that all that was pure and strongest in his crushed nature
struggled madly to be free? He thrust it down; the self-learned lesson of
years was not to be conquered in a moment.
"There have been times," he said, in a smothered, restless voice, "when I
thought you belonged to me. Not here, but before this life. My soul and
body thirst and hunger for you, then, Margaret."
She did not answer; her hands worked feebly together.
He came nearer, and held up his arras to where she stood,--the heavy,
masterful face pale and wet.
"I need you, Margaret. I shall be nothing without you, now. Come,
Margaret, little Margaret!"
She came to him, and put her hands in his.
"No, Stephen," she said.
If there were any pain in her tone, she kept it down, for his sake.
"Never, I could never help you,--as you are. It might have been, once.
Good-bye, Stephen."
Her childish way put him in mind of the old days when this girl was dearer
to him than his own soul. She was so yet. He held her, looking down into
her eyes. She moved uneasily; she dared not trust her resolution.
"You will come?" he said. "It might have been,--it shall be again."
"It may be," she said, humbly. "God is good. And I believe in you,
Stephen. I will be yours some time: we cannot help it, if we would: but
not as you are."
"You do not love me?" he said, flinging off her hand.
She said nothing, gathered her damp shawl around her, and turned to go.
Just a moment they stood, looking at each other. If the dark square figure
standing there had been an iron fate trampling her young life down into
hopeless wretchedness, she forgot it now. Women like Margaret are apt to
forget. His eye never abated in its fierce question.
"I will wait for you yonder, if I die first," she whispered.
He came closer, waiting for an answer.
"And--I love you, Stephen."
He gathered her in his arms, and put his cold lips to hers, without a
word; then turned and left her slowly.
She made no sign, shed no tear, as she stood watching him go. It was all
over: she had willed it, herself, and yet--he could not go! God would not
suffer it! Oh, he could not leave her,--he could not!--He went down the
hill, slowly. If it were a trial of life and death for her, did he know or
care?--He did not look back. What if he did not? his heart was true; he
suffered in going; even now he walked wearily. God forgive her, if she had
wronged him!--What did it matter, if he were hard in this life, and it
hurt her a little? It would come right,--beyond, some time. But life was
long.--She would not sit down, sick as she was: he might turn, and it
would vex him to see her suffer.--He walked slowly; once he stopped to
pick up something. She saw the deep-cut face and half-shut eyes. How often
those eyes had looked into her soul, and it had answered! They never would
look so any more.--There was a tree by the place where the road turned
into town. If he came back, he would be sure to turn there.--How tired he
walked, and slow!--If he was sick, that beautiful woman could be near
him,--help him.--She never would touch his hand again,--never again,
never,--unless he came back now.--He was near the tree: she closed her
eyes, turning away. When she looked again, only the bare road lay there,
yellow and wet. It was over, now.
How long she sat there she did not know. She tried once or twice to go to
the house, but the lights seemed so far off that she gave it up and sat
quiet, unconscious except of the damp stones her head leaned on and the
stretch of muddy road. Some time, she knew not when, there was a heavy
step beside her, and a rough hand shook hers where she stooped feebly
tracing out the lines of mortar between the stones. It was Knowles. She
looked up, bewildered.
"Hunting catarrhs, eh?" he growled, eying her keenly. "Got your father on
the Bourbons, so took the chance to come and find you. He'll not miss _me_
for an hour. That man has a natural hankering after treason against the
people. Lord, Margaret! what a stiff old head he'd have carried to the
guillotine! How he'd have looked at the _canaille_!"
He helped her up gently enough.
"Your bonnet's like a wet rag,"--with a furtive glance at the worn-out
face. A hungry face always, with her life unfed by its stingy few crumbs
of good; but to-night it was vacant with utter loss.
She got up, trying to laugh cheerfully, and went beside him down the road.
"You saw that painted Jezebel to-night, and"--stopping abruptly.
She had not heard him, and he followed her doggedly, with an occasional
snort or grunt or other inarticulate damn at the obstinate mud. She
stopped at last, with a quick gasp. Looking at her, he chafed her limp
hands,--his huge, uncouth face growing pale. When she was better, he said,
gravely,--
"I want you, Margaret. Not at home, child. I want to show you something."
He turned with her suddenly off the main road into a by-path, helping her
along, watching her stealthily, but going on with his disjointed, bearish
growls. If it stung her from her pain, vexing her, he did not care.
"I want to show you a bit of hell: outskirt. You're in a fit state: it'll
do you good. I'm minister there. The clergy can't attend to it just now:
they're too busy measuring God's truth by the States'-Rights doctrine or
the Chicago Platform. Consequence, religion yields to majorities. Are you
able? It's only a step."
She went on indifferently. The night was breathless and dark. Black, wet
gusts dragged now and then through the skyless fog, striking her face with
a chill. The Doctor quit talking, hurrying her, watching her anxiously.
They came at last to the railway-track, with long trains of empty
freight-cars.
"We are nearly there," he whispered. "It's time you knew your work, and
forgot your weakness. The curse of pampered generations. 'High Norman
blood,'--pah!"
There was a broken gap in the fence. He led her through it into a muddy
yard. Inside was one of those taverns you will find in the suburbs of
large cities, haunts of the lowest vice. This one was a smoky frame
standing on piles over an open space where hogs were rooting. Half a dozen
drunken Irishmen were playing poker with a pack of greasy cards in an
out-house. He led her up the rickety ladder to the one room, where a
flaring tallow-dip threw a saffron glare into the darkness. A putrid odor
met them at the door. She drew back, trembling.
"Come here!" he said, fiercely, clutching her hand. "Women as fair and
pure as you have come into dens like this,--and never gone away. Does it
make your delicate breath faint? And you a follower of the meek and lowly
Jesus! Look here! and here!"
The room was swarming with human life. Women, idle trampers,
whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep or smoking on the floor, and set
up a chorus of whining begging when they entered. Half-naked children
crawled about in rags. On the damp, mildewed walls there was hung a
picture of the Benicia Boy, and close by Pio Nono, crook in hand, with the
usual inscription, "Feed my sheep." The Doctor looked at it.
"'_Tu es Petrus, et super hanc_'--Good God! what is truth?" he muttered,
bitterly.
He dragged her closer to the women, through the darkness and foul smell.
"Look in their faces," he whispered. "There is not one of them that is not
a living lie. Can they help it? Think of the centuries of serfdom and
superstition through which their blood has crawled. Come closer,--here."
In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the
underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and
there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws. One little pickaninny
rubbed its sleepy eyes and laughed at them.
"So much flesh and blood out of the market, unweighed!"
Margaret took up the child, kissing its brown face. Knowles looked at her.
"Would you touch her? I forgot you were born down South. Put it down, and
come on."
They went out of the door. Margaret stopped, looking back.
"Did I call it a bit of hell? It's only a glimpse of the under-life of
America,--God help us!--where all men are born free and equal."
The air in the passage grew fouler. She leaned back faint and shuddering.
He did not heed her. The passion of the man, the terrible pity for these
people, came out of his soul now, whitening his face and dulling his eyes.
"And you," he said, savagely, "you sit by the road-side, with help in your
hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost, quarrel with
your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you,--because you are
balked in your puny hope! Look at these women. What is their loss, do you
think? Go back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your
lost dream, and go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy!
Come here,--let me hear what you call this."
He led her through the passage, up a narrow flight of stairs. An old woman
in a flaring cap sat at the top, nodding,--wakening now and then, to rock
herself to and fro, and give the shrill Irish keen.
"You know that stoker who was killed in the mill a month ago? Of course
not,--what are such people to you? There was a girl who loved him,-you
know what that is? She's dead now, here. She drank herself to death,--a
most unpicturesque suicide. I want you to look at her. You need not blush
for her life of shame, now; she's dead.--Is Hetty here?"
The woman got up.
"She is, Zur. She is, Mem. She's lookin' foine in her Sunday suit. Shrouds
is gone out, Mem, they say."
She went tipping over the floor to something white that lay on a board, a
candle at the head, and drew off the sheet. A girl of fifteen, almost a
child, lay underneath, dead,--her lithe, delicate figure decked out in a
barred plaid skirt, and stained, faded velvet bodice,--her neck and arms
bare. The small face was purely cut, haggard, patient in its sleep,--the
soft, fair hair gathered off the tired forehead. Margaret leaned over her
shuddering, pinning her handkerchief about the child's dead neck.
"How young she is!" muttered Knowles. "Merciful God, how young she
is!--What is that you say?" sharply, seeing Margaret's lips move.
"'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.'"
"Ah, child, that is old-time philosophy. Put your hand here, on her dead
face. Is your loss like hers?" he said lower, looking into the dull pain
in her eyes. Selfish pain he called it.
"Let me go," she said. "I am tired."
He took her out into the cool, open road, leading her tenderly
enough,--for the girl suffered, he saw.
"What will you do?" he asked her then. "It is not too late,--will you help
me save these people?"
She wrung her hands helplessly.
"What do you want with me?" she cried, weakly. "I have enough to bear."
The burly black figure before her seemed to tower and strengthen; the
man's face in the wan light showed a terrible life-purpose coming out
bare.
"I want you to do your work. It is hard; it will wear out your strength
and brain and heart. Give yourself to these people. God calls you to it.
There is none to help them. Give up love, and the petty hopes of women.
Help me. God calls you to the work."
She went on blindly: he followed her. For years he had set apart this girl
to help him in his scheme: he would not be balked now. He had great hopes
from his plan: he meant to give all he had: it was the noblest of aims. He
thought some day it would work like leaven through the festering mass
under the country he loved so well, and raise it to a new life. If it
failed,--if it failed, and saved one life, his work was not lost. But it
could not fail.
"Home!" he said, stopping her as she reached the stile,--"oh, Margaret,
what is home? There is a cry going up night and day from homes like that
den yonder, for help,--and no man listens."
She was weak; her brain faltered.
"Does God call me to this work? Does He call me?" she moaned.
He watched her eagerly.
"He calls you. He waits for your answer. Swear to me that you will help
His people. Give up father and mother and love, and go down as Christ did.
Help me to give liberty and truth and Jesus' love to these wretches on the
brink of hell. Live with them, raise them with you."
She looked up, white; she was a weak, weak woman, sick for her natural
food of love.
"Is it my work?"
"It is your work. Listen to me, Margaret," softly. "Who cares for you? You
stand alone to-night. There is not a single human heart that calls you
nearest and best. Shiver, if you will,--it is true. The man you wasted
your soul on left you in the night and cold to go to his bride,--is
sitting by her now, holding her hand in his."
He waited a moment, looking down at her, until she should understand.
"Do you think you deserved this of God? I know that yonder on the muddy
road you looked up to Him, and knew it was not just; that you had done
right, and this was your reward. I know that for these two years you have
trusted in the Christ you worship to make it right, to give you your
heart's desire. Did He do it? Did He hear your prayer? Does He care for
your weak love, when the nations of the earth are going down? What is your
poor hope to Him, when the very land you live in is a wine-press that will
be trodden some day by the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God? O
Christ!--if there be a Christ,--help me to save it!"
He looked up,--his face white with pain. After a time he said to her,--
"Help me, Margaret! Your prayer was selfish; it was not heard. Give up
your idle hope that Christ will aid you. Swear to me, this night when you
have lost all, to give yourself to this work."
The storm had been dark and windy: it cleared now slowly, the warm summer
rain falling softly, the fresh blue stealing broadly from behind the gray.
It seemed to Margaret like a blessing; for her brain rose up stronger,
more healthful.
"I will not swear," she said, weakly. "I think He heard my prayer. I think
He will answer it. He was a man, and loved as we do. My love is not
selfish; it is the best gift God has given me."
Knowles went slowly with her to the house. He was not baffled. He knew
that the struggle was yet to come; that, when she was alone, her faith in
the far-off Christ would falter; that she would grasp at this work, to
fill her empty hands and starved heart, if for no other reason,--to stifle
by a sense of duty her unutterable feeling of loss. He was keenly read in
woman's heart, this Knowles. He left her silently, and she passed through
the dark passage to her own room.
Putting her damp shawl off, she sat down on the floor, leaning her head on
a low chair,--one her father had given her for a Christmas gift when she
was little. How fond Holmes and her father used to be of each other! Every
Christmas he spent with them. She remembered them all now. "He was sitting
by her now, holding her hand in his." She said that over to herself,
though it was not hard to understand.
After a long time, her mother came with a candle to the door.
"Good-night, Margaret. Why, your hair is wet, child!"
For Margaret, kissing her good-night, had laid her head down a minute on
her breast. She stroked the hair a moment, and then turned away.
"Mother, could you stay with me to-night?"
"Why, no, Maggie,--your father wants me to read to him."
"Oh, I know. Did he miss me to-night,--father?"
"Not much; we were talking old times over,--in Virginia, you know."
"I know; good-night."
She went back to the chair. Tige was there,--for he used to spend half of
his time on the farm. She put her arm about his head. God knows how lonely
the poor child was when she drew the dog so warmly to her heart: not for
his master's sake alone; but it was all she had. He grew tired at last,
and whined, trying to get out.
"Will you go, Tige?" she said, and opened the window.
He jumped out, and she watched him going towards town. Such a little
thing, it was! But not even a dog "called her nearest and best."
Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read. Do you
think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds in His hand, knew
or cared how alone the child was? What if she wrung her thin hands, grew
sick with the slow, mad, solitary tears?--was not the world to save, as
Knowles said?
He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own received
him not: so, while the struggling world rested, unconscious, in infinite
calm of right, He came close to her with human eyes that had loved, and
not been loved, and had suffered with that pain. And, trusting Him, she
only said, "Show me my work! Thou that takest away the pain of the world,
have mercy upon me!"
For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and
indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he thought.
Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to the
mill, would have remembered his mother's the day she died. How the stern
old woman met death half-way! why should she fear? she was as strong as
he. Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean: she was going to
meet her just reward.
It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul. It
was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of growth, labor,
achievement,--eternal.
"_Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast_,"--favorite words with him. He liked to study
the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his
own,--a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love and
hate and suffering, and over all (the peculiar identity of the man) a
cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and
depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time.
"_Ohne Hast_." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by
marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow,
narrow fixedness of purpose,--each life complete in itself: why not his
own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood
alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there
were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it.
Knowles--that old skeptic--believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe
himself, what was it he said? "_Der Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst
und erhält er nicht dich, mich, sich selbst_?"
There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over them, like
half-comprehended music,--as simple and tender as if they had come from
the depths of a woman's heart: it touched him deeper than his power of
control. Pah! it was a dream of Faust's; he, too, had his Margaret; he
fell, through that love.
He went on slowly to the mill. If the name or the words woke a subtile
remorse or longing, he buried them under restful composure. Whether they
should ever rise like angry ghosts of what might have been, to taunt the
man, only the future could tell.
Going through the gas-lit streets, Holmes met some cordial greeting at
every turn. What a just, clever fellow he was! people said: one of those
men improved by success: just to the defrauding of himself: saw the true
worth of everybody, the very lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem:
despised all humbug and show, one could see, though he never said it: when
he was a boy, he was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but
success had improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the
beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their
tambourines up to him.
The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow over the
square. It was empty, he supposed; only one hand generally remained to
keep in the furnace-fires. Going through one of the lower passages, he
heard voices, and turned aside to examine. The management was not strict,
and in case of a fire the mill was not insured: like Knowles's
carelessness.
It was Lois and her father,--Joe Yare being feeder that night. They were
in one of the great furnace-rooms in the cellar,--a very comfortable place
that stormy night. Two or three doors of the wide brick ovens were open,
and the fire threw a ruddy glow over the stone floor, and shimmered into
the dark recesses of the shadows, very home-like after the rain and mud
without. Lois seemed to think so, at any rate, for she had made a table of
a store-box, put a white cloth on it, and was busy getting up a regular
supper for her father,--down on her knees before the red coals, turning
something on an iron plate, while some slices of ham sent up a cloud of
juicy, hungry smell.
The old stoker had just finished slaking the out-fires, and was putting
some blue plates on the table, gravely straightening them. He had grown
old, as Polston said,--Holmes saw, stooped much, with a low, hacking
cough; his coarse clothes were curiously clean: that was to please Lois,
of course. She put the ham on the table, and some bubbling coffee, and
then, from a hickory board in front of the fire, took off, with a jerk,
brown, flaky slices of Virginia johnny-cake.
"Ther' yoh are, father, hot 'n' hot," with her face on
fire,--"ther'--yoh--are,--coaxin' to be eatin'.--Why, Mr. Holmes! Father!
Now, ef yoh jes' hedn't hed yer supper?"
She came up, coaxingly. What brooding brown eyes the poor cripple had! Not
many years ago he would have sat down with the two poor souls and made a
hearty meal of it: he had no heart for such follies now.
Old Yare stood in the background, his hat in his hand, stooping in his
submissive negro fashion, with a frightened watch on Holmes.
"Do you stay here, Lois?" he asked, kindly, turning his back on the old
man.
"On'y to bring his supper. I couldn't bide all night 'n th' mill,"--the
old shadow coming on her face,--"I couldn't, yoh know. _He_ doesn't mind
it."
She glanced quickly from one to the other in the silence, seeing the fear
on her father's face.
"Yoh know father, Mr. Holmes? He's back now. This is him."
The old man came forward, humbly.
"It's me, Master Stephen."
The sullen, stealthy face disgusted Holmes. He nodded, shortly.
"Yoh've been kind to my little girl while I was gone," he said, catching
his breath. "I thank yoh, master."
"You need not. It was for Lois."
"'Twas fur her I comed back hyur. 'Twas a resk,"--with a dumb look of
entreaty at Holmes,--"but fur her I thort I'd try it. I know 'twas a
resk; but I thort them as cared fur Lo wud be merciful. She's a good girl,
Lo. She's all I hev."
Lois brought a box over, lugging it heavily.
"We hevn't chairs; but yoh'll sit down, Mr. Holmes?" laughing as she
covered it with a cloth. "It's a warrm place, here. Father studies 'n his
watch, 'n' I'm teacher,"--showing the torn old spelling-book.
The old man came eagerly forward, seeing the smile flicker on Holmes's
face.
"It's slow work, master,--slow. But Lo's a good teacher, 'n' I'm
tryin',--I'm tryin' hard."
"It's not slow, Sir, seein' father hedn't 'dvantages, like me. He was a"--
She stopped, lowering her voice, a hot flush of shame on her face.
"I know."
"Ben't that 'n 'xcuse, master, seein' I knowed noght at the beginnin'?
Thenk o' that, master. I'm tryin' to be a different man. Fur Lo. I _am_
tryin'."
Holmes did not notice him.
"Good-night, Lois," he said, kindly, as she lighted his lamp.
He put some money on the table.
"You must take it," as she looked uneasy. "For Tiger's board, say. I never
see him now. A bright new frock, remember."
She thanked him, her eyes brightening, looking at her father's patched
coat.
The old man followed Holmes out.
"Master Holmes"--
"Have done with this," said Holmes, sternly. "Whoever breaks law abides by
it. It is no affair of mine."
The old man clutched his hands together fiercely, struggling to be quiet.
"Ther's none knows it but yoh," he said, in a smothered voice. "Fur God's
sake be merciful! It'll kill my girl,--it'll kill her. Gev me a chance,
master."
"You trouble me. I must do what is just."
"It's not just," he said, savagely. "What good'll it do me to go back
ther'? I was goin' down, down, an' bringin' th' others with me. What
good'll it do you or the rest to hev me ther'? To make me afraid? It's
poor learnin' frum fear. Who taught me what was right? Who cared? No man
cared fur my soul, till I thieved 'n' robbed; 'n' then judge 'n' jury 'n'
jailers was glad to pounce on me. Will yoh gev me a chance? will yoh?"
It was a desperate face before him; but Holmes never knew fear.
"Stand aside," he said, quietly. "To-morrow I will see you. You need not
try to escape."
He passed him, and went slowly up through the vacant mill to his chamber.
The man sat down on the lower step a few moments, quite quiet, crushing
his hat up in a slow, steady way, looking up at the mouldy cobwebs on the
wall. He got up at last, and went in to Lois. Had she heard? The old
scarred face of the girl looked years older, he thought,--but it might be
fancy. She did not say anything for a while, moving slowly, with a new
gentleness, about him; her very voice was changed, older. He tried to be
cheerful, eating his supper: she need not know until to-morrow. He would
get out of the town to-night, or--There were different ways to escape.
When he had done, he told her to go; but she would not.
"Let me stay th' night," she said. "I ben't afraid o' th' mill."
"Why, Lo," he said, laughing, "yoh used to say yer death was hid here,
somewheres."
"I know. But ther's worse nor death. But it'll come right," she said,
persistently, muttering to herself, as she leaned her face on her knees,
watching,--"it'll come right."
The glimmering shadows changed and faded for an hour. The man sat quiet.
There was not much in the years gone to soften his thought, as it grew
desperate and cruel: there was oppression and vice heaped on him, and
flung back out of his bitter heart. Nor much in the future: a blank
stretch of punishment to the end. He was an old man: was it easy to bear?
What if he were black? what if he were born a thief? what if all the
sullen revenge of his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest
poor? Was there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a
kind hand might not have brought to life? None? Something, I think,
struggled up in the touch of his hand, catching the skirt of his child's
dress, when it came near him, with the timid tenderness of a mother
touching her dead baby's hair,--as something holy, far off, yet very near:
something in his old crime-marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting
his head on my knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow
memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past. A wrong to both,
you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed.
Never?
"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.
Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the thin gray
hairs through her fingers.
"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly. But stay with me,--stay,
father!"
"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of jealousy.
"Ther's none like yoh,--none."
She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he
could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had ever
compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad now and
thankful for every fault and deformity that brought her nearer to him, and
made her dearer.
"They're kind, but ther's not many loves me with true love, like yoh.
Stay, father! Bear it out, whatever it be. Th' good time'll come, father."
He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the street. When he
left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the mill. God knows
what vague dread was in her brain; but she came back to watch and help.
Old Yare wandered through the great loom-rooms of the mill with but one
fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that above him the man
lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow. Up
and down, aimlessly, with his stoker's torch in his hand, going over the
years gone and the years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the
pitiless man above him,--with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought
of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,--of the
corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th' Alabam',"--of the
scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really owned: he
was almost as proud of it as he was of Lois when she was born. Most of all
remembering the good times in his life, he went back to Lois. It was all
good, there, to go back to. What a little chub she used to be!
Remembering, with bitter remorse, how all his life he had meant to try and
do better, on her account, but had kept putting off and putting off until
now. And now--Did nothing lie before him but to go back and rot yonder?
Was that the end, because he never had learned better, and was a "dam'
nigger"?
"I'll _not_ leave my girl!" he muttered, going up and down,--"I'll _not_
leave my girl!"
If Holmes did sleep above him, the trial of the day, of which we have seen
nothing, came back sharper in sleep. While the strong self in the man lay
torpid, whatever holier power was in him came out, undaunted by defeat,
and unwearied, and took the form of dreams, those slighted messengers of
God, to soothe and charm and win him out into fuller, kindlier life. Let
us hope that they did so win him; let us hope that even in that unreal
world the better nature of the man triumphed at last, and claimed its
reward before the terrible reality broke upon him.
Lois, over in the damp, fresh-smelling lumber-yard, sat coiled up in one
of the creviced houses made by the jutting boards. She remembered how she
used to play in them, before she went into the mill. The mill,--even now,
with the vague dread of some uncertain evil to come, the mill absorbed all
fear in its old hated shadow. Whatever danger was coming to them lay in
it, came from it, she knew, in her confused, blurred way of thinking. It
loomed up now, with the square patch of ashen sky above, black, heavy with
years of remembered agony and loss. In Lois's hopeful, warm life this was
the one uncomprehended monster. Her crushed brain, her unwakened powers,
resented their wrong dimly to the mass of iron and work and impure smells,
unconscious of any remorseless power that wielded it. It was a monster,
she thought, through the sleepy, dreading night,--a monster that kept her
wakeful with a dull, mysterious terror.
When the night grew sultry and deepest, she started from her half-doze to
see her father come stealthily out and go down the street. She must have
slept, she thought, rubbing her eyes, and watching him out of sight,--and
then, creeping out, turned to glance at the mill. She cried out, shrill
with horror. It was a live monster now,--in one swift instant, alive with
fire,--quick, greedy fire, leaping like serpents' tongues out of its
hundred jaws, hungry sheets of flame maddening and writhing towards her,
and under all a dull and hollow roar that shook the night. Did it call her
to her death? She turned to fly, and then--He was alone, dying! He had
been so kind to her! She wrung her hands, standing there a moment. It was
a brave hope that was in her heart, and a prayer on her lips never left
unanswered, as she hobbled, in her lame, slow way, up to the open black
door, and, with one backward look, went in.
* * * * *
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.
The publication, now brought to a close, of a new edition of the novels of
Cooper[6] gives us a fair occasion for discharging a duty which Maga has
too long neglected, and saying something upon the genius of this great
writer, and, incidentally, upon the character of a man who would have been
a noticeable, not to say remarkable person, had he never written a line.
These novels stand before us in thirty-two goodly duodecimo volumes, well
printed, gracefully illustrated, and, in all external aspects, worthy of
generous commendation. With strong propriety, the publishers dedicate this
edition of the "first American novelist" to "the American People." No one
of our great writers is more thoroughly American than Cooper; no one has
caught and reproduced more broadly and accurately the spirit of our
institutions, the character of our people, and even the aspects of Nature
in this our Western world. He was a patriot to the very core of his heart;
he loved his country with a fervid, but not an undiscerning love: it was
an intelligent, vigilant, discriminating affection that bound his heart to
his native land; and thus, while no man defended his country more
vigorously when it was in the right, no one reproved its faults more
courageously, or gave warning and advice more unreservedly, where he felt
that they were needed.
[6] We refer to the new edition of the novels of Cooper by Messrs.
W.A. Townsend & Co., with illustrations by Darley.
This may be one reason why Cooper has more admirers, or at least fewer
disparagers, abroad than at home. On the Continent of Europe his novels
are everywhere read, with an eager, unquestioning delight. His popularity
is at least equal to that of Scott; and we think a considerable amount of
testimony could be collected to prove that it is even greater. But the
fact we have above stated is not the only explanation of this. He was the
first writer who made foreign nations acquainted with the characters and
incidents of American frontier and woodland life; and his delineations of
Indian manners and traits were greatly superior in freshness and power, if
not in truth, to any which had preceded them. His novels opened a new and
unwrought vein of interest, and were a revelation of humanity under
aspects and influences hitherto unobserved by the ripe civilization of
Europe. The taste which had become cloyed with endless imitations of the
feudal and mediaeval pictures of Scott turned with fresh delight to such
original figures--so full of sylvan power and wildwood grace--as Natty
Bumppo and Uncas. European readers, too, received these sketches with an
unqualified, because an ignorant admiration. We, who had better knowledge,
were more critical, and could see that the drawing was sometimes faulty,
and the colors more brilliant than those of life.
The acute observer can detect a parallel between the relation of Cooper to
America and that of Scott to Scotland. Scott was as hearty a Scotchman as
Cooper an American: but Scott was a Tory in politics and an Episcopalian
in religion; and the majority of Scotchmen are Whigs in politics and
Presbyterians in religion. In Scott, as in Cooper, the elements of passion
and sympathy were so strong that he could not be neutral or silent on the
great questions of his time and place. Thus, while the Scotch are proud of
Scott, as they well may be,--while he has among his own people most
intense and enthusiastic admirers,--the proportion of those who yield to
his genius a cold and reluctant homage is probably greater in Scotland
than in any other country in Christendom. "The rest of mankind recognize
the essential truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal
instincts and sympathies of humanity"; but the Scotch cannot forget that
he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters with an Episcopalian
pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image of the detested Claverhouse.
The novels of Cooper, in the dates of their publication, cover a period of
thirty years: beginning with "Precaution," in 1820, and ending with "The
Ways of the Hour," in 1850. The production of thirty-two volumes in thirty
years is honorable to his creative energy, as well as to the systematic
industry of his habits. But even these do not constitute the whole of his
literary labors during these twenty-nine years. We must add five volumes
of naval history and biography, ten volumes of travels and sketches in
Europe, and a large amount of occasional and controversial writings, most
of which is now hidden away in that huge wallet wherein Time puts his alms
for Oblivion. His literary productions other than his novels would alone
be enough to save him from the reproach of idleness. In estimating a
writer's claims to honor and remembrance, the quantity as well as the
quality of his work should surely be taken into account; and in summing up
the case of our great novelist to the jury of posterity, this point should
be strongly put.
Cooper's first novel, "Precaution," was published when he was in his
thirty-first year. It owed its existence to an accident, and was but an
ordinary production, as inferior to the best of his subsequent works as
Byron's "Hours of Idleness" to "Childe Harold." It was a languid and
colorless copy of exotic forms: a mere scale picked from the surface of
the writer's mind, with neither beauty nor vital warmth to commend it. We
speak from the vague impressions which many long years have been busy in
effacing; and we confess that it would require the combined forces of a
long voyage and a scanty library to constrain us to the task of reading it
anew.
And yet, such as it was, it made a certain impression at the time of its
appearance. The standard by which it was tried was very unlike that which
would now be applied to it: there was all the difference between the two
that there is between strawberries in December and strawberries in June.
American literature was then just beginning to "glint forth" like Burns's
mountain daisy, and rear its tender form above the parent earth. The time
had, indeed, gone by--which a friend of ours, not yet venerable, affirms
he can well remember--when school-boys and collegians, zealous for the
honor of indigenous literature, were obliged to cite, by way of
illustration, such works as Morse's Geography and Hannah Adams's "History
of the Jews"; but it was only a faint, crepuscular light, that streaked
the east, and gave promise of the coming day. Irving had just completed
his "Sketch-Book," which was basking in the full sunshine of unqualified
popularity. Dana, in the thoughtful and meditative beauty of "The Idle
Man," was addressing a more limited public. Percival had just before
published a small volume of poems; Halleck's "Fanny" had recently
appeared; and so had a small duodecimo volume by Bryant, containing "The
Ages," and half a dozen smaller poems. Miss Sedgwick's "New England Tale"
was published about the same time. But a large proportion of those who are
now regarded as our ablest writers were as yet unknown, or just beginning
to give sign of what they were. Dr. Channing was already distinguished as
an eloquent and powerful preacher, but the general public had not yet
recognized in him that remarkable combination of loftiness of thought with
magic charm of style, which was soon to be revealed in his essays on
Milton and Napoleon Bonaparte. Ticknor and Everett were professors in
Harvard College, giving a new impulse to the minds of the students by
their admirable lectures; and the latter was also conducting the "North
American Review." Neither had as yet attained to anything more than a
local reputation. Prescott, a gay and light-hearted young man,--gay and
light-hearted, in spite of partial blindness,--the darling of society and
the idol of his home, was silently and resolutely preparing himself for
his chosen function by a wide and thorough course of patient study.
Bancroft was in Germany, and working like a German. Emerson was a Junior
in College. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Poe were
school-boys; Mrs. Stowe was a school-girl; Whipple and Lowell were in the
nursery, and Motley and the younger Dana had not long been out of it.
"Precaution," though an indifferent novel, was yet a novel; of the
orthodox length, with plot, characters, and incidents; and here and there
a touch of genuine power, as in the forty-first chapter, where the scene
is on board a man-of-war bringing her prizes into port. It found many
readers, and excited a good deal of curiosity as to who the author might
be.
"Precaution" was published on the 25th of August, 1820, and "The Spy" on
the 17th of September, 1821. The second novel was a great improvement upon
the first, and fairly took the public by storm. We are old enough to
remember its first appearance; the eager curiosity and keen discussion
which it awakened; the criticism which it called forth; and, above all,
the animated delight with which it was received by all who were young or
not critical. Distinctly, too, can we recall the breathless rapture with
which we hung over its pages, in those happy days when the mind's appetite
for books was as ravenous as the body's for bread-and-butter, and a novel,
with plenty of fighting in it, was all we asked at a writer's hands. In
order to qualify ourselves for the task which we have undertaken in this
article, we have read "The Spy" a second time; and melancholy indeed was
the contrast between the recollections of the boy and the impressions of
the man. It was the difference between the theatre by gas-light and the
theatre by day-light: the gold was pinchbeck, the gems were glass, the
flowers were cambric and colored paper, the goblets were gilded
pasteboard. Painfully did the ideal light fade away, and the
well-remembered scene stand revealed in disenchanting day. With
incredulous surprise, with a constant struggle between past images and
present revelations, were we forced to acknowledge the improbability of
the story, the clumsiness of the style, the awkwardness of the dialogue,
the want of Nature in many of the characters, the absurdity of many of the
incidents, and the painfulness of some of the scenes. But with all this, a
candid, though critical judgment could not but admit that these grave
defects were attended by striking merits, which pleaded in mitigation of
literary sentence. It was stamped with a truth, earnestness, and vital
power, of which its predecessor gave no promise. Though the story was
improbable, it seized upon the attention with a powerful grasp from the
very start, and the hold was not relaxed till the end. Whatever criticism
it might challenge, no one could call it dull: the only offence in a book
which neither gods nor men nor counters can pardon. If the narrative
flowed languidly at times, there were moments in which the incidents
flashed along with such vivid rapidity that the susceptible reader held
his breath over the page. The character of Washington was an elaborate
failure, and the author, in his later years, regretted that he had
introduced this august form into a work of fiction; but Harvey Birch was
an original sketch, happily conceived, and, in the main, well sustained.
His mysterious figure was recognized as a new accession to the repertory
of the novelist, and not a mere modification of a preëxisting type. And,
above all, "The Spy" had the charm of reality; it tasted of the soil; it
was the first successful attempt to throw an imaginative light over
American history, and to do for our country what the author of "Waverley"
had done for Scotland. Many of the officers and soldiers of the
Revolutionary War were still living, receiving the reward of their early
perils and privations in the grateful reverence which was paid to them by
the contemporaries of their children and grandchildren. Innumerable
traditionary anecdotes of those dark days of suffering and struggle,
unrecorded in print, yet lingered in the memories of the people, and were
told in the nights of winter around the farm-house fire; and of no part of
the country was this more true than of the region in which the scene of
the novel is laid. The enthusiasm with which it was there read was the
best tribute to the substantial fidelity of its delineations. All over the
country, it enlisted in its behalf the powerful sentiment of patriotism;
and whatever the critics might say, the author had the satisfaction of
feeling that the heart of the people was with him.
Abroad, "The Spy" was received with equal favor. It was soon translated
into most of the languages of Europe; and even the "gorgeous East" opened
for it its rarely moving portals. In 1847, a Persian version was published
in Ispahan; and by this time it may have crossed the Chinese wall, and be
delighting the pig-tailed critics and narrow-eyed beauties of Pekin.
The success of "The Spy" unquestionably determined Cooper's vocation, and
made him a man of letters. But he had not yet found where his true
strength lay. His training and education had not been such as would seem
to be a good preparation for a literary career. His reading had been
desultory, and not extensive; and the habit of composition had not been
formed in early life. Indeed, in mere style, in the handling of the tools
of his craft, Cooper never attained a master's ease and power. In his
first two novels the want of technical skill and literary accomplishment
was obvious; and the scenery, subjects, and characters of these novels did
not furnish him with the opportunity of turning to account the peculiar
advantages which had come to him from the events of his childhood and
youth. In his infancy he was taken to Cooperstown, a spot which his father
had just begun to reclaim from the dominion of the wilderness. Here his
first impressions of the external world, as well as of life and manners,
were received. At the age of sixteen he became a midshipman in the United
States navy, and remained in the service for six years. A father who, in
training up his son for the profession of letters, should send him into
the wilderness in his infancy and to sea at sixteen, would seem to be
shooting very wide of the mark; but in this, as in so many things, there
is a divinity that shapes our rough-hewn ends. Had Cooper enjoyed the best
scholastic advantages which the schools and colleges of Europe could have
furnished, they could not have fitted him for the work he was destined to
do so well as the apparently untoward elements we have above adverted to;
for Natty Bumppo was the fruit of his woodland experience, and Long Tom
Coffin of his sea-faring life.
"The Pioneers" and "The Pilot" were both published in 1823; "Lionel
Lincoln" in 1825; and "The Last of the Mohicans" in 1826. We may put
"Lionel Lincoln" aside, as one of his least successful productions; but
the three others were never surpassed, and rarely equalled, by any of his
numerous subsequent works. All the powerful, and nearly all the
attractive, qualities of his genius were displayed in these three novels,
in their highest degree and most ample measure. Had he never written any
more,--though we should have missed many interesting narratives, admirable
pictures, and vigorously drawn characters,--we are not sure that his fame
would not have been as great as it is now. From these, and "The Spy," full
materials may be drawn for forming a correct estimate of his merits and
his defects. In these, his strength and weakness, his gifts and
deficiencies, are amply shown. Here, then, we may pause, and, without
pursuing his literary biography any farther, proceed to set down our
estimate of his claims as a writer. Any critic who dips his pen in ink and
not in gall would rather praise than blame; therefore we will dispose of
the least gracious part of our task first, and begin with his blemishes
and defects.
A skilful construction of the story is a merit which the public taste no
longer demands, and it is consequently fast becoming one of the lost arts.
The practice of publishing novels in successive numbers, so that one
portion is printed before another is written, is undoubtedly one cause of
this. But English and American readers have not been accustomed to this
excellence in the works of their best writers of fiction; and therefore
they are not sensitive to the want of it. This is certainly not one of
Scott's strong points. Fielding's "Tom Jones" is, in this respect,
superior to any of the "Waverley Novels," and without an equal, so far as
we know, in English literature. But, in sitting in judgment upon a writer
of novels, we cannot waive an inquiry into his merits on this point. Are
his stories, simply as stories, well told? Are his plots symmetrically
constructed and harmoniously evolved? Are his incidents probable? and do
they all help on the catastrophe? Does he reject all episodical matter
which would clog the current of the narrative? Do his novels have unity of
action? or are they merely a series of sketches, strung together without
any relation of cause and effect? Cooper, tried by these rules, can
certainly command no praise. His plots are not carefully or skilfully
constructed. His incidents are not probable in themselves, nor do they
succeed each other in a natural and dependent progression. His characters
get into scrapes from which the reasonable exercise of common faculties
should have saved them; and they are rescued by incredible means and
impossible instruments. The needed man appears as unaccountably and
mysteriously as if he had dropped from the clouds, or emerged from the
sea, or crept up through a fissure in the earth. The winding up of his
stories is often effected by devices nearly as improbable as a violation
of the laws of Nature. His personages act without adequate motives; they
rush into needless dangers; they trust their fate, with unsuspecting
simplicity, to treacherous hands.
In works of fiction the skill of the writer is most conspicuously shown
when the progress of the story is secured by natural and probable
occurrences. Many events take place in history and in common life which
good taste rejects as inadmissible in a work of imagination. Sudden death
by disease or casualty is no very uncommon occurrence in real life; but it
cannot be used in a novel to clear up a tangled web of circumstance,
without betraying something of a poverty of invention in the writer. He is
the best artist who makes least use of incidents which lie out of the
beaten path of observation and experience. In constructive skill Cooper's
rank is not high; for all his novels are more or less open to the
criticism that too frequent use is made in them of events very unlikely to
have happened. He leads his characters into such formidable perils that
the chances are a million to one against their being rescued. Such a run
is made upon our credulity that the fund is soon exhausted, and the bank
stops payment.
For illustration of the above strictures we will refer to a single novel,
"The Last of the Mohicans," which everybody will admit to be one of the
most interesting of his works,--full of rapid movement, brilliant
descriptions, hair-breadth escapes, thrilling adventures,--which young
persons probably read with more rapt attention than any other of his
narratives. In the opening chapter we find at Fort Edward, on the
head-waters of the Hudson, the two daughters of Colonel Munro, the
commander of Fort William Henry, on the shores of Lake George; though why
they were at the former post, under the protection of a stranger, and not
with their father, does not appear. Information is brought of the approach
of Montcalm, with a hostile army of Indians and Frenchmen, from the North;
and the young ladies are straightway hurried off to the more advanced, and
consequently more dangerous post, when prudence and affection would have
dictated just the opposite course. Nor is this all. General Webb, the
commander of Fort Edward, at the urgent request of Colonel Munro, sends
him a reinforcement of fifteen hundred men, who march off through the
woods, by the military road, with drums beating and colors flying; and
yet, strange to say, the young ladies do not accompany the troops, but set
off, on the very same day, by a by-path, attended by no other escort than
Major Heyward, and guided by an Indian whose fidelity is supposed to be
assured by his having been flogged for drunkenness by the orders of
Colonel Munro. The reason assigned for conduct so absurd that in real life
it would have gone far to prove the parties having a hand in it not to be
possessed of that sound and disposing mind and memory which the law
requires as a condition precedent to making a will is, that hostile
Indians, in search of chance scalps, would be hovering about the column of
troops, and so leave the by-path unmolested. But the servants of the party
follow the route of the column: a measure, we are told, dictated by the
sagacity of the Indian guide, in order to diminish the marks of their
trail, if, haply, the Canadian savages should be prowling about so far in
advance of their army! Certainly, all the sagacity of the fort would seem
to have been concentrated in the person of the Indian. How much of this
improbability might have been avoided, if the action had been reversed,
and the young ladies, in view of the gathering cloud of war, had been sent
from the more exposed and less strongly guarded point of Fort William
Henry to the safe fortress of Fort Edward! Then the smallness of the
escort and the risks of the journey would have been explained and excused
by the necessity of the case; and the subsequent events of the novel might
have been easily accommodated to the change we have indicated.
One of the best of Cooper's novels--as a work of art perhaps the very
best--is "The Bravo." But the character of Jacopo Frontoni is a sort of
moral impossibility, and the clearing up of the mystery which hangs over
his life and conduct, which is skilfully reserved to the last moment, is
consequently unsatisfactory. He is represented as a young man of the
finest qualities and powers, who, in the hope of rescuing a father who had
been falsely imprisoned by the Senate, consents to assume the character,
and bear the odium, of a public bravo, or assassin, though entirely
innocent. This false position gives rise to many most effective scenes and
incidents, and the character is in many respects admirably drawn. But when
the end comes, we lay down the book and say,--"This could never have been:
a virtuous and noble young man could not for years have been believed to
be the most hateful of mankind; the laws of Nature and the laws of the
human mind forbid it: so vast a web of falsehood could not have been woven
without a flaw: we can credit much of the organized and pitiless despotism
of Venice, but could it work miracles?"
Further illustrations of this same defect might easily be cited, if the
task were not ungracious. Neither books, nor pictures, nor men and women
should be judged by their defects. It is enough to say that Cooper never
wrote a novel in regard to which the reader must not lay aside his
critical judgment upon the structure of the story and the interdependence
of the incidents, and let himself be borne along by the rapid flow of the
narrative, without questioning too curiously as to the nature of the means
and instruments employed to give movement to the stream.
In the delineation of character, Cooper may claim great, but not
unqualified praise. This is a vague statement; and to draw a sharper line
of discrimination, we should say that he is generally successful--sometimes
admirably so--in drawing personages in whom strong primitive traits have
not been effaced by the attritions of artificial life, and generally
unsuccessful when he deals with those in whom the original characteristics
are less marked, or who have been smoothed by education and polished by
society. It is but putting this criticism in another form to say that his
best characters are persons of humble social position. He wields his brush
with a vigorous hand, but the brush itself has not a fine point. Of all
the children of his brain, Natty Bumppo is the most universal
favorite,--and herein the popular judgment is assuredly right. He is an
original conception,--and not more happily conceived than skilfully
executed. It was a hazardous undertaking to present the character
backwards, and let us see the closing scenes of his life first,--like a
Hebrew Bible, of which the beginning is at the end; but the author's
genius has triumphed over the perils of the task, and given us a
delineation as consistent and symmetrical as it is striking and vigorous.
Ignorant of books, simple, and credulous, guileless himself, and
suspecting no evil in others, with moderate intellectual powers, he
commands our admiration and respect by his courage, his love of Nature,
his skill in woodland lore, his unerring moral sense, his strong
affections, and the veins of poetry that run through his rugged nature
like seams of gold in quartz. Long Tom Coffin may be described as
Leatherstocking suffered a sea-change,--with a harpoon instead of a rifle,
and a pea-jacket instead of a hunting-shirt. In both the same primitive
elements may be discerned: the same limited intellectual range combined
with professional or technical skill; the same generous affections and
unerring moral instincts; the same religious feeling, taking the form at
times of fatalism or superstition. Long Tom's love of the sea is like
Leatherstocking's love of the woods; the former's dislike of the land is
like the latter's dislike of the clearings. Cooper himself, as we are told
by his daughter, was less satisfied, in his last years, with Long Tom
Coffin than most of his readers,--and, of the two characters, considered
that of Boltrope the better piece of workmanship. We cannot assent to this
comparative estimate; but we admit that Boltrope has not had full justice
done to him in popular judgment. It is but a slight sketch, but it is
extremely well done. His death is a bit of manly and genuine pathos; and
in his conversations with the chaplain there is here and there a touch of
true humor, which we value the more because humor was certainly not one of
the author's best gifts.
Antonio, the old fisherman, in "The Bravo," is another very well drawn
character, in which we can trace something of a family likeness to the
hunter and sailor above mentioned. The scene in which he is shrived by the
Carmelite monk, in his boat, under the midnight moon, upon the Lagoons, is
one of the finest we know of in the whole range of the literature of
fiction, leaving upon the mind a lasting impression of solemn and pathetic
beauty. In "The Chainbearer," the Yankee squatter, Thousandacres, is a
repulsive figure, but drawn with a powerful pencil. The energy of
character, or rather of action, which is the result of a passionate love
of money, is true to human nature. The closing scenes of his rough and
lawless life, in which his latent affection for his faithful wife throws a
sunset gleam over his hard and selfish nature, and prevents it from being
altogether hateful, are impressively told, and are touched with genuine
tragic power.
On the other hand, Cooper generally fails when he undertakes to draw a
character which requires for its successful execution a nice observation
and a delicate hand. His heroes and heroines are apt to abuse the
privilege which such personages have enjoyed, time out of mind, of being
insipid. Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy grace and unconscious
dignity of high-bred men and women. His gentlemen, whether young or old,
are apt to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially
his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and
faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth
with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot but think
that these fine creatures, with hair, brow, eyes, and lips of the most
orthodox and approved pattern, would do very little towards helping one
through a rainy day in a country-house. Judge Temple, in "The Pioneers,"
and Colonel Howard, in "The Pilot," are highly estimable and respectable
gentlemen, but, in looking round for the materials of a pleasant
dinner-party, we do not think they would stand very high on the list. They
are fair specimens of their class,--the educated gentleman in declining
life,--many of whom are found in the subsequent novels. They are wanting
in those natural traits of individuality by which, in real life, one human
being is distinguished from another. They are obnoxious to this one
general criticism, that the author is constantly reminding us of the
qualities of mind and character on which he rests their claims to favor,
without causing them to appear naturally and unconsciously in the course
of the narrative. The defect we are adverting to may be illustrated by
comparing such personages of this class as Cooper has delineated with
Colonel Talbot, in "Waverley," Colonel Mannering and Counsellor Pleydell,
in "Guy Mannering," Monkbarns, in "The Antiquary," and old Osbaldistone,
in "Rob Roy." These are all old men: they are all men of education, and in
the social position of gentlemen; but each has certain characteristics
which the others have not: each has the distinctive individual
flavor-perceptible, but indescribable, like the savor of a fruit--which is
wanting in Cooper's well-dressed and well-behaved lay-figures.
In the delineation of female loveliness and excellence Cooper is generally
supposed to have failed,--at least, comparatively so. But in this respect
full justice has hardly been done him; and this may be explained by the
fact that it was from the heroines of his earlier novels that this
unfavorable judgment was drawn. Certainly, such sticks of barley-candy as
Frances Wharton, Cecilia Howard, and Alice Munro justify the common
impression. But it would be as unfair to judge of what he can do in this
department by his acknowledged failures as it would be to form an estimate
of the genius of Michel Angelo from the easel-picture of the Virgin and
Child in the Tribune at Florence. No man ever had a juster appreciation
of, and higher reverence for, the worth of woman than Cooper. Towards
women his manners were always marked by chivalrous deference, blended as
to those of his own household with the most affectionate tenderness. His
own nature was robust, self-reliant, and essentially masculine: such men
always honor women, but they understand them better as they grow older.
There is so much foundation for the saying, that men are apt to love their
first wives best, but to treat their second wives best. Thus the reader
who takes up his works in chronological order will perceive that the
heroines of his later novels have more spirit and character, are drawn
with a more discriminating touch, take stronger hold upon the interest,
than those of his earlier. Ursula Malbone is a finer girl than Cecilia
Howard, or even Elizabeth Temple. So when he has occasion to delineate a
woman who, from her position in life, or the peculiar circumstances into
which she is thrown, is moved by deeper springs of feeling, is obliged to
put forth sterner energies, than are known to females reared in the
sheltered air of prosperity and civilization,--when he paints the heart of
woman roused by great perils, overborne by heavy sorrows, wasted by strong
passions,--we recognize the same master-hand which has given us such
powerful pictures of character in the other sex. In other words, Cooper is
not happy in representing those shadowy and delicate graces which belong
exclusively to woman, and distinguish her from man; but he is generally
successful in sketching in woman those qualities which are found in both
sexes. In "The Bravo," Donna Violetta, the heroine, a rich and high-born
young lady, is not remarkable one way or the other; but Gelsomina, the
jailer's daughter, born in an inferior position, reared in a sterner
school of discipline and struggle, is a beautiful and consistent creation,
constantly showing masculine energy and endurance, yet losing nothing of
womanly charm. Ruth, in "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," Hetty Hutter, the
weak-minded and sound-hearted girl, in "The Deerslayer," Mabel Dunham, and
the young Indian woman, "Dew of June," in "The Pathfinder," are further
cases in point. No one can read the books in which these women are
represented and say that Cooper was wanting in the power of delineating
the finest and highest attributes of womanhood,
Cooper cannot be congratulated upon his success in the few attempts he has
made to represent historical personages. Washington, as shown to us in
"The Spy," is a formal piece of mechanism, as destitute of vital character
as Maelzel's automaton trumpeter. This, we admit, was a very difficult
subject, alike from the peculiar traits of Washington, and from the
reverence in which his name and memory are held by his countrymen. But the
sketch, in "The Pilot," of Paul Jones, a very different person, and a much
easier subject, is hardly better. In both cases, the failure arises from
the fact that the author is constantly endeavoring to produce the
legitimate effect of mental and moral qualities by a careful enumeration
of external attributes. Harper, under which name Washington is introduced,
appears in only two or three scenes; but, during these, we hear so much of
the solemnity and impressiveness of his manner, the gravity of his brow,
the steadiness of his gaze, that we get the notion of a rather oppressive
personage, and sympathize with the satisfaction of the Whartons, when he
retires to his own room, and relieves them of his tremendous presence. Mr.
Gray, who stands for Paul Jones, is more carefully elaborated, but the
result is far from satisfactory. We are so constantly told of his calmness
and abstraction, of his sudden starts and bursts of feeling, of his low
voice, of his fits of musing, that the aggregate impression is that of
affectation and self-consciousness, rather than of a simple, passionate,
and heroic nature. Mr. Gray does not seem to us at all like the rash,
fiery, and dare-devil Scotchman of history. His conduct and conversation,
as recounted in the fifth chapter of the novel, are unnatural and
improbable; and we cannot wonder that the first lieutenant did not know
what to make of so melodramatic and sententious a gentleman, in the guise
of a pilot.
Cooper, as we need hardly say, has drawn copiously upon Indian life and
character for the materials of his novels; and among foreign nations much
of his reputation is due to this fact. Civilized men and women always take
pleasure in reading about the manners and habits of savage life; and those
in whom the shows of things are submitted to the desires of the mind
delight to invest them with those ideal qualities which they do not find,
or think they do not, in the artificial society around them. Cooper had
enjoyed no peculiar opportunities of studying by personal observation the
characteristics of the Indian race, but he had undoubtedly read everything
he could get hold of in illustration of the subject. No one can question
the vividness and animation of his sketches, or their brilliant tone of
color. He paints with a pencil dipped in the glow of our sunset skies and
the crimson of our autumn maples. Whenever he brings Indians upon the
stage, we may be sure that scenes of thrilling interest are before us:
that rifles are to crack, tomahawks to gleam, and arrows to dart like
sunbeams through the air; that a net of peril is to be drawn around his
hero or heroine, from the meshes of which he or she is to be extricated by
some unexpected combination of fortunate circumstances. We expect a
succession of startling incidents, and a rapid course of narrative without
pauses or languid intervals. We do not object to his idealizing his
Indians: this is the privilege of the novelist, time out of mind. He may
make them swift of foot, graceful in movement, and give them a form like
the Apollo's; he may put as much expression as he pleases into their black
eyes; he may tessellate their speech as freely as he will with poetical
and figurative expressions, drawn from the aspects of the external world:
for all this there is authority, and chapter and verse may be cited in
support of it. But we have a right to ask that he shall not transcend the
bounds of reason and possibility, and represent his red men as moved by
motives and guided by sentiments which are wholly inconsistent with the
inexorable facts of the case. We confess to being a little more than
skeptical as to the Indian of poetry and romance: like the German's camel,
he is evolved from the depth of the writer's own consciousness. The poet
takes the most delicate sentiments and the finest emotions of civilization
and cultivation, and grafts them upon the best qualities of savage life;
which is as if a painter should represent an oak-tree bearing roses. The
life of the North-American Indian, like that of all men who stand upon the
base-line of civilization, is a constant struggle, and often a losing
struggle, for mere subsistence. The sting of animal wants is his chief
motive of action, and the full gratification of animal wants his highest
ideal of happiness. The "noble savage," as sketched by poets, weary of the
hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness of artificial life, is
really a very ignoble creature, when seen in the "open daylight" of truth.
He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces
of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,--which make
up the novelist's stock in trade,--are not and cannot be the growth of a
so-called state of Nature, which is an essentially unnatural state. We no
more believe that Logan ever made the speech reported by Jefferson, in so
many words, than we believe that Chatham ever made the speech in reply to
Walpole which begins with, "The atrocious crime of being a young man";
though we have no doubt that the reporters in both cases had something
fine and good to start from. We accept with acquiescence, nay, with
admiration, such characters as Magua, Chingachgook, Susquesus, Tamenund,
and Canonchet; but when we come to Uncas, in "The Last of the Mohicans,"
we pause and shake our heads with incredulous doubt. That a young Indian
chief should fall in love with a handsome quadroon like Cora Munro--for
she was neither more nor less than that--is natural enough; but that he
should manifest his passion with such delicacy and refinement is
impossible. We include under one and the same name all the affinities and
attractions of sex, but the appetite of the savage differs from the love
of the educated and civilized man as much as charcoal differs from the
diamond. The sentiment of love, as distinguished from the passion, is one
of the last and best results of Christianity and civilization: in no one
thing does savage life differ from civilized more than in the relations
between man and woman, and in the affections that unite them. Uncas is a
graceful and beautiful image; but he is no Indian.
We turn now to a more gracious part of our task, and proceed to say
something of the many striking excellences which distinguish Cooper's
writings, and have given him such wide popularity. Popularity is but one
test of merit, and not the highest,--gauging popularity by the number of
readers, at any one time, irrespective of their taste and judgment. In
this sense, "The Scottish Chiefs" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw" were once as
popular as any of the Waverley Novels. But Cooper's novels have enduring
merit, and will surely keep their place in the literature of the language.
The manners, habits, and costumes of England have greatly changed during
the last hundred years; but Richardson and Fielding are still read. We
must expect corresponding changes in this country during the next century;
but we may confidently predict that in the year 1962 young and impressible
hearts will be saddened at the fate of Uncas and Cora, and exult when
Captain Munson's frigate escapes from the shoals.
A few pages back we spoke of Cooper's want of skill in the structure of
his plots, and his too frequent recurrence to improbable incidents to help
on the course of his stories. But most readers care little about this
defect, provided the writer betrays no poverty of invention, and succeeds
in making his narratives interesting. Herein Cooper never lays himself
open to that instinctive and unconscious criticism, which is the only kind
an author need dread, because from it there is no appeal. It is bad to
have a play hissed down, but it is worse to have it yawned down. But over
Cooper's pages his readers never yawn. They never break down in the middle
of one of his stories. The fortunes of his characters are followed with
breathless and accumulating interest to the end. In vain does the
dinner-bell sound, or the clock strike the hour of bed-time: the book
cannot be laid down till we know whether Elizabeth Temple is to get out of
the woods without being burned alive, or solve the mystery that hangs over
the life of Jacopo Frontoni. He has in ample measure that paramount and
essential merit in a novelist of fertility of invention. The resources of
his genius, alike in the devising of incidents and the creation of
character, are inexhaustible. His scenes are laid on the sea and in the
forest,--in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain,--amid the refinements
and graces of civilization and the rudeness and hardships of frontier and
pioneer life; but everywhere he moves with an easy and familiar tread, and
everywhere, though there may be the motive and the cue for minute
criticism, we recognize the substantial truth of his pictures. In all his
novels the action is rapid and the movement animated: his incidents may
not be probable, but they crowd upon each other so thickly that we have
not time to raise the question: before one impression has become familiar,
the scene changes, and new objects enchain the attention. All rapid motion
is exhilarating alike to mind and body; and in reading Cooper's novels we
feel a pleasure analogous to that which stirs the blood when we drive a
fast horse or sail with a ten-knot breeze. This fruitfulness in the
invention of incidents is nearly as important an element in the
composition of a novelist as a good voice in that of a singer. A powerful
work of fiction may be produced by a writer who has not this gift; but
such works address a comparatively limited public. To the common mind no
faculty in the novelist is so fascinating as this. "Caleb Williams" is a
story of remarkable power; but "Ivanhoe" has a thousand readers to its
one.
In estimating novelists by the number and variety of characters with which
they have enriched the repertory of fiction, Cooper's place, if not the
highest, is very high. The fruitfulness of his genius in this regard is
kindred to its fertility in the invention of incidents. We can pardon in a
portrait-gallery of such extent here and there an ill-drawn figure or a
face wanting in expression. With the exception of Scott, and perhaps of
Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a greater number of
characters such as stamp themselves upon the memory so that an allusion to
them is well understood in cultivated society? Fielding has drawn country
squires, and Smollett has drawn sailors; but neither has intruded upon the
domain of the other, nor could he have made the attempt without failure.
Some of our living novelists have a limited list of characters; they have
half a dozen types which we recognize as inevitably as we do the face and
voice of an actor in the king, the lover, the priest, or the bandit: but
Cooper is not a mere mannerist, perpetually copying from himself. His
range is very wide: it includes white men, red men, and black
men,--sailors, hunters, and soldiers,--lawyers, doctors, and
clergymen,--past generations and present,--Europeans and
Americans,--civilized and savage life. All his delineations are not
successful; some are even unsuccessful: but the aberrations of his genius
must be viewed in connection with the extent of the orbit through which it
moves. The courage which led him to expose himself to so many risks of
failure is itself a proof of conscious power.
Cooper's style has not the ease, grace, and various power of Scott's,--or
the racy, idiomatic character of Thackeray's,--or the exquisite purity and
transparency of Hawthorne's: but it is a manly, energetic style, in which
we are sure to find good words, if not the best. It has certain wants, but
it has no marked defects; if it does not always command admiration, it
never offends. It has not the highest finish; it sometimes betrays
carelessness: but it is the natural garb in which a vigorous mind clothes
its conceptions. It is the style of a man who writes from a full mind,
without thinking of what he is going to say; and this is in itself a
certain kind of merit. His descriptive powers are of a high order. His
love of Nature was strong; and, as is generally the case with intellectual
men, it rather increased than diminished as he grew older. It was not the
meditative and self-conscious love of a sensitive spirit, that seeks in
communion with the outward world a relief from the burdens and struggles
of humanity, but the hearty enjoyment of a thoroughly healthy nature, the
schoolboy's sense of a holiday dwelling in a manly breast. His finest
passages are those in which he presents the energies and capacities of
humanity in combination with striking or beautiful scenes in Nature. His
genius, which sometimes moves with "compulsion and laborious flight" when
dealing with artificial life and the manners and speech of cultivated men,
and women, here recovers all its powers, and sweeps and soars with
victorious and irresistible wing. The breeze from the sea, the fresh air
and wide horizon of the prairies, the noonday darkness of the forest are
sure to animate his drooping energies, and breathe into his mind the
inspiration of a fresh life. Here he is at home, and in his congenial
element: he is the swan on the lake, the eagle in the air, the deer in the
woods. The escape of the frigate, in the fifth chapter of "The Pilot," is
a well-known passage of this kind; and nothing can be finer. The technical
skill, the poetical feeling, the rapidity of the narrative, the
distinctness of the details, the vividness of the coloring, the life,
power, and animation which breathe and burn in every line, make up a
combination of the highest order of literary merit. It is as good a
sea-piece as the best of Turner's; and we cannot give it higher praise. We
hear the whistling of the wind through the rigging, and the roar of the
pitiless sea, bellowing for its prey; we see the white caps of the waves
flashing with spectral light through the darkness, and the gallant ship
whirled along like a bubble by the irresistible current; we hold our
breath as we read of the expedients and manoeuvres which most of us but
half understand, and heave a long sigh of relief when the danger is past,
and the ship reaches the open sea. A similar passage, though of more quiet
and gentler beauty, is the description of the deer-chase on the lake, in
the twenty-seventh chapter of "The Pioneers." Indeed, this whole novel is
full of the finest expressions of the author's genius. Into none of his
works has he put more of the warmth of personal feeling and the glow of
early recollection. His own heart beats through every line. The fresh
breezes of the morning of life play round its pages, and its unexhaled dew
hangs upon them. It is colored throughout with the rich hues of
sympathetic emotion. All that is attractive in pioneer life is reproduced
with substantial truth; but the pictures are touched with those finer
lights which time pours over the memories of childhood. With what spirit
and power all the characteristic incidents and scenes of a new settlement
are described,--pigeon-shooting, bass-fishing, deer-hunting, the making of
maple-sugar, the turkey-shooting at Christmas, the sleighing-parties in
winter! How distinctly his landscapes are painted,--the deep, impenetrable
forest, the gleaming lake, the crude aspect and absurd architecture of the
new-born village! How full of poetry in the ore is the conversation of
Leatherstocking! The incongruities and peculiarities of social life which
are the result of a sudden rush of population into the wilderness are also
well sketched; though with a pencil less free and vivid than that with
which he paints the aspects of Nature and the movements of natural man. As
respects the structure of the story, and the probability of the incidents,
the novel is open to criticism; but such is the fascination that hangs
over it, that it is impossible to criticize. To do this would be as
ungracious as to correct the language and pronunciation of an old friend
who revives by his conversation the fading memories of school-boy and
college life.
Cooper would have been a better writer, if he had had more of the quality
of humor, and a keener sense of the ridiculous; for these would have saved
him from his too frequent practice of introducing both into his narrative
and his conversations, but more often into the latter, scraps of
commonplace morality, and bits of sentiment so long worn as to have lost
all their gloss. In general, his genius does not appear to advantage in
dialogue. His characters have not always a due regard to the brevity of
human life. They make long speeches, preach dull sermons, and ventilate
very self-evident propositions with great solemnity of utterance. Their
discourse wants not only compression, but seasoning. They are sometimes
made to talk in such a way that the force of caricature can hardly go
farther. For instance, in "The Pioneers," Judge Temple, coming into a room
in his house, and seeing a fire of maple-logs, exclaims to Richard Jones,
his kinsman and factotum,--"How often have I forbidden the use of the
sugar-maple in my dwelling! The sight of that sap, as it _exudes_ with the
heat, is painful to me, Richard." And in another place, he is made to say
to his daughter,--"Remember the heats of July, my daughter; nor venture
farther than thou canst _retrace before the meridian_." We may be sure
that no man of woman born, in finding fault about the burning of
maple-logs, ever talked of the sap's "exuding"; or, when giving a daughter
a caution against walking too far, ever translated getting home before
noon into "retracing before the meridian." This is almost as bad as Sir
Piercie Shafton's calling the cows "the milky mothers of the herds."
So, too, a lively perception of the ludicrous would have saved Cooper from
certain peculiarities of phrase and awkwardnesses of expression,
frequently occurring in his novels, such as might easily slip from the pen
in the rapidity of composition, but which we wonder should have been
overlooked in the proof-sheet. A few instances will illustrate our
meaning. In the elaborate description of the personal charms of Cecilia
Howard, in the tenth chapter of "The Pilot," we are told of "a small hand
which _seemed to blush at its own naked beauties_." In "The Pioneers,"
speaking of the head and brow of Oliver Edwards, he says,--"The very air
and manner with which _the member haughtily maintained itself_ over the
coarse and even wild attire," etc. In "The Bravo," we read,--"As the
stranger passed, his _glittering organs rolled over_ the persons of the
gondolier and his companion," etc.; and again, in the same novel,--"The
packet was received calmly, though _the organ_ which glanced at its seal,"
etc. In "The Last of the Mohicans," the complexion of Cora appears
"charged with the color of the rich blood that _seemed ready to burst its
bounds_." These are but trivial faults; and if they had not been so easily
corrected, it would have been hypercriticism to notice them.
Every author in the department of imaginative literature, whether of prose
or verse, puts more or less of his personal traits of mind and character
into his writings. This is very true of Cooper; and much of the worth and
popularity of his novels is to be ascribed to the unconscious expressions
and revelations they give of the estimable and attractive qualities of the
man. Bryant, in his admirably written and discriminating biographical
sketch, originally pronounced as a eulogy, and now prefixed to
"Precaution" in Townsend's edition, relates that a distinguished man of
letters, between whom and Cooper an unhappy coolness had for some time
existed, after reading "The Pathfinder," remarked,--"They may say what
they will of Cooper, the man who wrote this book is not only a great man,
but a good man." This is a just tribute; and the impression thus made by a
single work is confirmed by all. Cooper's moral nature was thoroughly
sound, and all his moral instincts were right. His writings show in how
high regard he held the two great guardian virtues of courage in man and
purity in woman. In all his novels we do not recall a single expression of
doubtful morality. He never undertakes to enlist our sympathies on the
wrong side. If his good characters are not always engaging, he never does
violence to virtue by presenting attractive qualities in combination with
vices which in real life harden the heart and coarsen the taste. We do not
find in his pages those moral monsters in which the finest sensibilities,
the richest gifts, the noblest sentiments are linked to heartless
profligacy, or not less heartless misanthropy. He never palters with
right; he enters into no truce with wrong; he admits of no compromise on
such points. How admirable in its moral aspect is the character of
Leatherstocking! he is ignorant, and of very moderate intellectual range
or grasp; but what dignity, nay, even grandeur, is thrown around him from
his noble moral qualities,--his undeviating rectitude, his
disinterestedness, his heroism, his warm affections! No writer could have
delineated such a character so well who had not an instinctive and
unconscious sympathy with his intellectual offspring. Praise of the same
kind belongs to Long Tom Coffin, and Antonio, the old fisherman. The
elements of character--truth, courage, and affection--are the same in all.
Harvey Birch and Jacopo Frontoni are kindred conceptions: both are in a
false relation to those around them; both assume a voluntary load of
obloquy; both live and move in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust;
but in both the end sanctifies and exalts the means; the element of
deception in both only adds to the admiration finally awakened. The
carrying out of conceptions like these--the delineation of a character
that perpetually weaves a web of untruth, and yet through all maintains
our respect, and at last secures our reverence--was no easy task; but
Cooper's success is perfect.
Cooper was fortunate in having been born with a vigorous constitution, and
in having kept through life the blessing of robust health. He never
suffered from remorse of the stomach or protest of the brain; and his
writings are those of a man who always digested his dinner and never had a
headache. His novels, like those of Scott, are full of the breeze and
sunshine of health. They breathe of manly tastes, active habits, sound
sleep, a relish for simple pleasures, temperate enjoyments, and the
retention in manhood of the fresh susceptibilities of youth. His genius is
thoroughly masculine. He is deficient in acute perception, in delicate
discrimination, in fine analysis, in the skill to seize and arrest
exceptional peculiarities; but he has in large measure the power to
present the broad characteristics of universal humanity. It is to this
power that he owes his wide popularity. At this moment, in every public
and circulating library in England or America, the novels of Cooper will
be found to be in constant demand. He wrote for the many, and not for the
few; he hit the common mind between wind and water; a delicate and
fastidious literary appetite may not be attracted to his productions, but
the healthy taste of the natural man finds therein food alike convenient
and savory.
In a manly, courageous, somewhat impulsive nature like Cooper's we should
expect to find prejudices; and he was a man of strong prejudices. Among
others, was an antipathy to the people of New England. His characters,
male and female, are frequently Yankees, but they are almost invariably
caricatures; that is, they have all the unamiable characteristics and
unattractive traits which are bestowed upon the people of New England by
their ill-wishers. Had he ever lived among them, with his quick powers of
observation and essentially kindly judgment of men and life, he could not
have failed to correct his misapprehensions, and to perceive that he had
taken the reverse side of the tapestry for the face.
Cooper, with a very keen sense of injustice, conscious of inexhaustible
power, full of vehement impulses, and not largely endowed with that safe
quality called prudence, was a man likely to get involved in
controversies. It was his destiny, and he never could have avoided it, to
be in opposition to the dominant public sentiment around him. Had he been
born in Russia, he could hardly have escaped a visit to Siberia; had he
been born in Austria, he would have wasted some of his best years in
Spielberg. Under a despotic government he would have been a vehement
Republican; in a Catholic country he would have been the most
uncompromising of Protestants. He had full faith in the institutions of
his own country; and his large heart, hopeful temperament, and robust soul
made him a Democrat; but his democracy had not the least tinge of
radicalism. He believed that man had a right to govern himself, and that
he was capable of self-government; but government, the subordination of
impulse to law, he insisted upon as rigorously as the veriest monarchist
or aristocrat in Christendom. He would have no authority that was not
legitimate; but he would tolerate no resistance to legitimate authority.
All his sentiments, impulses, and instincts were those of a gentleman; and
vulgar manners, coarse habits, and want of respect for the rights of
others were highly offensive to him. When in Europe, he resolutely, and at
no little expense of time and trouble, defended America from unjust
imputations and ignorant criticism; and when at home, with equal courage
and equal energy, he breasted the current of public Opinion where he
deemed it to be wrong, and resisted those most formidable invasions of
right, wherein the many combine to oppress the one. His long controversy
with the press was too important an episode in his life to be passed over
by us without mention; though our limits will not permit us to make
anything more than a passing allusion to it. The opinion which will be
formed upon Cooper's course in this matter will depend, in a considerable
degree, upon the temperament of the critic. Timid men, cautious men, men
who love their ease, will call him Quixotic, rash, imprudent, to engage in
a controversy in which he had much to lose and little to gain; but the
reply to such suggestions is, that, if men always took counsel of
indolence, timidity, and selfishness, no good would ever be accomplished,
and no abuses ever be reformed. Cooper may not have been judicious in
everything he said and did; but that he was right in the main, both in
motive and conduct, we firmly believe. He acted from a high sense of duty;
there was no alloy of vindictiveness or love of money in the impulses
which moved him. Criticism the most severe and unsparing he accepted as
perfectly allowable, so long as it kept within the limits of literary
judgment; but any attack upon his personal character, especially any
imputation or insinuation involving a moral stain, he would not submit to.
He appealed to the laws of the land to vindicate his reputation and punish
his assailants. Long and gallant was the warfare he maintained,--a
friendless, solitary warfare,--and all the hydra-heads of the press
hissing and ejaculating their venom upon him,--with none to stand by his
side and wish him God-speed. But he persevered, and, what is more, he
succeeded: that, is to say, he secured all the substantial fruits of
success. He vindicated the principle for which he contended: he compelled
the newspapers to keep within the pale of literary criticism; he confirmed
the saying of President Jackson, that "desperate courage makes one a
majority."
Two of his novels, "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found," bear a strong
infusion of the feelings which led to his contest with the press. After
the publication of these, he became much interested in the well-known
Anti-Rent agitation by which the State of New York was so long shaken; and
three of his novels, "Satanstoe," "The Chainbearer," and "The Redskins,"
forming one continuous narrative, were written with reference to this
subject. Many professed novel-readers are, we suspect, repelled from these
books, partly because of this continuity of the story, and partly because
they contain a moral; but we assure them, that, if on these grounds they
pass them by, they lose both pleasure and profit. They are written with
all the vigor and spirit of his prime; they have many powerful scenes and
admirably drawn characters; the pictures of colonial life and manners in
"Satanstoe" are animated and delightful; and in all the legal and ethical
points for which the author contends he is perfectly right. In his Preface
to "The Chainbearer" he says,--"In our view, New York is at this moment a
disgraced State; and her disgrace arises from the fact that her laws are
trampled under foot, without any efforts--at all commensurate with the
object--being made to enforce them." That any commonwealth is a disgraced
State against which such charges can with truth be made no one will deny;
and any one who is familiar with the history of that wretched business
will agree, that, at the time it was made, the charge was not too strong.
Who can fail to admire the courage of the man who ventured to write and
print such a judgment as the above against a State of which he was a
native, a citizen, and a resident, and in which the public sentiment was
fiercely the other way? Here, too, Cooper's motives were entirely
unselfish: he had almost no pecuniary interest in the question of
Anti-Rentism; he wrote all in honor, unalloyed by thrift. His very last
novel, "The Ways of the Hour," is a vigorous exposition of the defects of
the trial by jury in cases where a vehement public sentiment has already
tried the question, and condemned the prisoner. The story is improbable,
and the leading character is an impossible being; but the interest is kept
up to the end,--it has many most impressive scenes,--it abounds with
shrewd and sound observations upon life, manners, and politics,--and all
the legal portion is stamped with an acuteness and fidelity to truth which
no professional reader can note without admiration.
Cooper's character as a man is the more admirable to us because it was
marked by strong points which are not common in our country, and which the
institutions of our country do not foster. He had the courage to defy the
majority: he had the courage to confront the press: and not from the sting
of ill-success, not from mortified vanity, not from wounded self-love, but
from an heroic sense of duty. How easy a life might he have purchased by
the cheap virtues of silence, submission, and acquiescence! Booksellers
would have enriched him; society would have caressed him; political
distinction would have crowned him: he had only to watch the course of
public sentiment, and so dispose himself that he should seem to lead where
he only followed, and all comfortable things would have been poured into
his lap. But he preferred to breast the stream, to speak ungrateful
truths. He set a wholesome example in this respect; none the less valuable
because so few have had the manliness and self-reliance to imitate him.
More than twenty years ago De Tocqueville said,--"I know of no country in
which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of
discussion as in America": words which we fear are not less true to-day
than when they were written. Cooper's dauntless courage would have been
less admirable, had he been hard, cold, stern, and impassive: but he was
none of these. He was full of warm affections, cordial, sympathetic, and
genial; he had a woman's tenderness of heart; he was the most faithful of
friends; and in his own home no man was ever more gentle, gracious, and
sweet. The blows he received fell upon a heart that felt them keenly; but
he bared his breast none the less resolutely to the contest because it was
not protected by an armor of insensibility.
But we must bring this long paper to a close. We cannot give to it the
interest which comes from personal recollections. We saw Cooper once, and
but once. This was the very year before he died, in his own home, and amid
the scenes which his genius has made immortal. It was a bright midsummer's
day, and we walked together about the village, and around the shores of
the lake over which the canoe of Indian John had glided. His own aspect
was as sunny as that of the smiling heavens above us; age had not touched
him with its paralyzing finger: his vigorous frame, elastic step, and
animated glance gave promise of twenty years more of energetic life. His
sturdy figure, healthy face, and a slight bluffness of manner reminded one
more of his original profession than of the life and manners of a man of
letters. He looked like a man who had lived much in the open air,--upon
whom the rain had fallen, and against whom the wind had blown. His
conversation was hearty, spontaneous, and delightful from its frankness
and fulness, but it was not pointed or brilliant; you remembered the
healthy ring of the words, but not the words themselves. We recollect,
that, as we were standing together on the shores of the lake,--shores
which are somewhat tame, and a lake which can claim no higher epithet than
that of pretty,--he said: "I suppose it would be patriotic to say that
this is finer than Como, but we know that it is not." We found a chord of
sympathy in our common impressions of the beauty of Sorrento, about which,
and his residence there, he spoke with contagious animation. Who could
have thought that that rich and abundant life was so near its close?
Nothing could be more thoroughly satisfying than the impression he left in
this brief and solitary interview. His air and movement revealed the same
manly, brave, true-hearted, warm-hearted man that is imaged in his books.
Grateful are we for the privilege of having seen, spoken with, and taken
by the hand the author of "The Pathfinder" and "The Pilot": "it is a
pleasure to have seen a great man." Distinctly through the gathering mists
of years do his face and form rise up before the mind's eye: an image of
manly self-reliance, of frank courage, of generous impulse; a frank
friend, an open enemy; a man whom many misunderstood, but whom no one
could understand without honoring and loving.
* * * * *
PER TENEBRAS, LUMINA.
I know how, through the golden hours
When summer sunlight floods the deep,
The fairest stars of all the heaven
Climb up, unseen, the effulgent steep.
Orion girds him with a flame;
And, king-like, from the eastward seas,
Comes Aldebaran, with his train
Of Hyades and Pleiades.
In far meridian pride, the Twins
Build, side by side, their luminous thrones;
And Sirius and Procyon pour
A splendor that the day disowns.
And stately Leo, undismayed,
With fiery footstep tracks the Sun,
To plunge adown the western blaze,
Sublimely lost in glories won.
I know, if I were called to keep
Pale morning watch with Grief and Pain,
Mine eyes should see their gathering might
Rise grandly through the gloom again.
And when the Winter Solstice holds
In his diminished path the Sun,--
When hope, and growth, and joy are o'er,
And all our harvesting is done,--
When, stricken, like our mortal Life,
Darkened and chill, the Year lays down
The summer beauty that she wore,
Her summer stars of Harp and Crown,--
Thick trooping with their golden tread
They come, as nightfall fills the sky,
Those strong and solemn sentinels,
To hold their mightier watch on high.
Ah, who shall shrink from dark and cold,
Or fear the sad and shortening days,
Since God doth only so unfold
The wider glory to his gaze?
Since loyal Truth, and holy Trust,
And kingly Strength defying Pain,
Stern Courage, and sure Brotherhood
Are born from out the depths again?
Dear Country of our love and pride!
So is thy stormy winter given!
So, through the terrors that betide,
Look up, and hail thy kindling heaven!
* * * * *
LOVE AND SKATES.
IN TWO PARTS.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
A KNOT AND A MAN TO CUT IT.
Consternation! Consternation in the back office of Benjamin Brummage,
Esq., banker in Wall Street.
Yesterday down came Mr. Superintendent Whiffler, from Dunderbunk, up the
North River, to say, that, "unless something be done, _at once_, the
Dunderbunk Foundry and Iron-Works must wind up." President Brummage
forthwith convoked his Directors. And here they sat around the green
table, forlorn as the guests at a Barmecide feast.
Well they might be forlorn! It was the rosy summer solstice, the longest
and fairest day of all the year. But rose-color and sunshine had fled from
Wall Street. Noisy Crisis towing black Panic, as a puffing steam-tug drags
a three-decker cocked and primed for destruction, had suddenly sailed in
upon Credit.
As all the green inch-worms vanish on the tenth of every June, so on the
tenth of that June all the money in America had buried itself and was as
if it were not. Everybody and everything was ready to fail. If the
hindmost brick went, down would go the whole file.
There were ten Directors of the Dunderbunk Foundry.
Now, not seldom, of a Board of ten Directors, five are wise and five are
foolish: five wise, who bag all the Company's funds in salaries and
commissions for indorsing its paper; five foolish, who get no salaries, no
commissions, no dividends,--nothing, indeed, but abuse from the
stockholders, and the reputation of thieves. That is to say, five of the
ten are pick-pockets; the other five, pockets to be picked.
It happened that the Dunderbunk Directors were all honest and foolish but
one. He, John Churm, honest and wise, was off at the West, with his
Herculean shoulders at the wheels of a dead-locked railroad. These honest
fellows did not wish Dunderbunk to fail for several reasons. First, it was
not pleasant to lose their investment. Second, one important failure might
betray Credit to Crisis with Panic at its heels, whereupon every
investment would be in danger. Third, what would become of their
Directorial reputations? From President Brummage down, each of these
gentlemen was one of the pockets to be picked in a great many companies.
Each was of the first Wall-Street fashion, invited to lend his name and
take stock in every new enterprise. Any one of them might have walked down
town in a long patchwork toga made of the newspaper advertisements of
boards in which his name proudly figured. If Dunderbunk failed, the toga
was torn, and might presently go to rags beyond repair. The first rent
would inaugurate universal rupture. How to avoid this disaster?--that was
the question.
"State the case, Mr. Superintendent Whiffler," said President Brummage, in
his pompous manner, with its pomp a little collapsed, _pro tempore_.
Inefficient Whiffler whimpered out his story.
The confessions of an impotent executive are sorry stuff to read.
Whiffler's long, dismal complaint shall not be repeated. He had taken a
prosperous concern, had carried on things in his own way, and now failure
was inevitable. He had bought raw material lavishly, and worked it badly
into half-ripe material, which nobody wanted to buy. He was in arrears to
his hands. He had tried to bully them, when they asked for their money.
They had insulted him, and threatened to knock off work, unless they were
paid at once. "A set of horrid ruffians," Whiffler said,--"and his life
wouldn't be safe many days among them."
"Withdraw, if you please, Mr. Superintendent," President Brummage
requested. "The Board will discuss measures of relief."
The more they discussed, the more consternation. Nobody said anything to
the purpose, except Mr. Sam Gwelp, his late father's lubberly son and
successor.
"Blast!" said he; "we shall have to let it slide!"
Into this assembly of imbeciles unexpectedly entered Mr. John Churm. He
had set his Western railroad trains rolling, and was just returned to
town. Now he was ready to put those Herculean shoulders at any other
bemired and rickety no-go-cart.
Mr. Churm was not accustomed to be a Director in feeble companies. He came
into Dunderbunk recently as executor of his friend Damer, a year ago bored
to death by a silly wife.
Churm's bristly aspect and incisive manner made him a sharp contrast to
Brummage. The latter personage was flabby in flesh, and the oppressively
civil counter-jumper style of his youth had grown naturally into a
deportment of most imposing pomposity.
The Tenth Director listened to the President's recitative of their
difficulties, chorused by the Board.
"Gentlemen," said Director Churm, "you want two things. The first is
Money!"
He pronounced this cabalistic word with such magic power that all the air
seemed instantly filled with a cheerful flight of gold American eagles,
each carrying a double eagle on its back and a silver dollar in its claws;
and all the soil of America seemed to sprout with coin, as after a shower
a meadow sprouts with the yellow buds of the dandelion.
"Money! yes, Money!" murmured the Directors.
It seemed a word of good omen, now.
"The second thing," resumed the newcomer, "is a Man!"
The Directors looked at each other and did not see such a being.
"The actual Superintendent of Dunderbunk is a dunderhead," said Churm.
"Pun!" cried Sam Gwelp, waking up from a snooze.
Several of the Directors, thus instructed, started a complimentary laugh.
"Order, gentlemen! Orrderr!" said the President, severely, rapping with a
paper-cutter.
"We must have a Man, not a Whiffler!" Churm continued. "And I have one in
my eye."
Everybody examined his eye.
"Would you be so good as to name him?" said Old Brummage, timidly.
He wanted to see a Man, but feared the strange creature might be
dangerous.
"Richard Wade," says Churm. They did not know him. The name sounded
forcible.
"He has been in California," the nominator said.
A shudder ran around the green table. They seemed to see a frowzy
desperado, shaggy as a bison, in a red shirt and jackboots, hung about the
waist with an assortment of six-shooters and bowie-knives, and standing
against a background of mustangs, monte-banks, and lynch-law.
"We must get Wade," Churm says, with authority. "He knows Iron by heart.
He can handle Men. I will back him with my blank check, to any amount, to
his order."
Here a murmur of applause, swelling to a cheer, burst from the Directors.
Everybody knew that the Geological Bank deemed Churm's deposits the
fundamental stratum of its wealth. They lay there in the vaults, like
underlying granite. When hot times came, they boiled up in a mountain to
buttress the world.
Churm's blank check seemed to wave in the air like an oriflamme of
victory. Its payee might come from Botany Bay; he might wear his beard to
his knees, and his belt stuck full of howitzers and boomerangs; he might
have been repeatedly hung by Vigilance Committees, and as often cut down
and revived by galvanism; but brandishing that check, good for anything
less than a million, every Director in Wall Street was his slave, his
friend, and his brother.
"Let us vote Mr. Wade in by acclamation," cried the Directors.
"But, gentlemen," Churm interposed, "if I give him my blank check, he must
have _carte blanche_, and no one to interfere in his management."
Every Director, from President Brummage down, drew a long face at this
condition.
It was one of their great privileges to potter in the Dunderbunk affairs
and propose ludicrous impossibilities.
"Just as you please," Churm continued. "I name a competent man, a
gentleman and fine fellow. I back him with all the cash he wants. But he
must have his own way. Now take him, or leave him!"
Such despotic talk had never been heard before in that Directors' Room.
They relucted a moment. But they thought of their togas of advertisements
in danger. The blank check shook its blandishments before their eyes.
"We take him," they said, and Richard Wade was the new Superintendent
unanimously.
"He shall be at Dunderbunk to take hold to-morrow morning," said Churm,
and went off to notify him.
Upon this, Consternation sailed out of the hearts of Brummage and
associates.
They lunched with good appetites over the green table, and the President
confidently remarked,--
"I don't believe there is going much of a crisis, after all."