cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault. Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of sectional rapacity. Have we, then, forgotten that the true prosperity of a nation is moral, and not material? that its strength depends, not on the width of its boundaries, nor the bulk of its census, but on its magnanimity, its honor, its fidelity to conscience? There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose. The sceptre which dropped successively from the grasp of Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, Rome, fell from a hand palsied by the moral degeneracy of the people; and the emasculate usurper or the foreign barbarian snatched and squandered the heritage of civilization which escheated for want of legitimate heirs of the old royal race, whose divine right was the imperial brain, and who found their strength in a national virtue which individualized itself in every citizen. The wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press, ominous of popular decadence.
Do our leading politicians, and the prominent bankers and merchants who sustain them, know what a dangerous lesson they are setting to a people whose affairs are controlled by universal suffrage, when they affirm that to be right which can by any false pretence be voted so? Does not he who undermines national principle sap the foundations of individual property also? If burglary may be committed on a commonwealth under form of law, is there any logic that will protect a bank-vault or a strong-box? When Mr. Buchanan, with a Jew broker at one elbow and a Frenchman at the other, (strange representatives of American diplomacy!) signed his name to the Ostend circular, was he not setting a writing-lesson for American youth to copy, and one which the pirate hand of Walker _did_ copy in ungainly letters of fire and blood in Nicaragua?
The vice of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of personal responsibility. The guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions. It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their constituencies or to the people. The President of the United States, during his four years of office, is less amenable to public opinion than the Queen of England through her ministers; senators, with embassies in prospect, laugh at instructions; representatives think they have made a good bargain when they exchange the barren approval of constituencies for the smile of one whom a lucky death, perhaps, has converted into the Presidential Midas of the moment; and in a nation of adventurers, success is too easily allowed to sanctify a speculation by which a man sells his pitiful self for a better price than even a Jew could get for the Saviour of the world. It cannot be too often repeated, that the only responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of every individual man in it to his conscience and his God. As long as anyone of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we sometimes vaguely boast, a sovereign,–a constituent part of Destiny; the infinite Future is his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal shears;–but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative’s cowardice, or the venal one’s itching palm. Our only safety, then, is in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the chances of representative dishonesty, or, at the worst, constitute a public opinion that shall make the whole country a penitentiary for such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of self-degradation. Let every man remember, that, though he may be a nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by ten when it is placed on the _right side_ of whatever unit for the time represents the cause of truth and justice. What we need is a thorough awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how the still and stealthy ashes of political apathy and moral insensibility are slipping under our feet and hurrying us with them toward the crater’s irrevocable core, it maybe that the effort of self-preservation called forth by the danger will make us love the daring energy and the dependence on our individual strength, that alone can keep us free and worthy to be freemen.
While we hold the moral aspect of the great question now before the country to be cardinal, there are also some practical ones which the Republican party ought never to lose sight of. To move a people among whom the Anglo-Saxon element is predominant, we will not say, with Lord Bacon, that we must convince their pockets, but we do believe that moral must always go hand in hand with common sense. They will take up arms for a principle, but they must have confidence in each other and in their leaders. Conscience is a good tutor to tell a man on which side to act, but she leaves the question of _How to act_ to every man’s prudence and judgment. An over-nice conscience has before now turned the stomach of a great cause on the eve of action. Cromwell knew when to split hairs and when skulls. The North has too generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and the success which is sure to follow concert of action. We have spent our strength in quarrelling about the character of men, when we should have been watchful only of the character of measures. A scruple of conscience has no right to outweigh a pound of duty, though it ought to make a ton of private interest kick the beam. The great aim of the Republican party should be to gain one victory for the Free States. One victory will make us a unit, and is equal to a reinforcement of fifty thousand men. The genius of success in politics or war is to know Opportunity at first sight. There is no mistress so easily tired as Fortune. We must waste no more time in investigating the motives of our recruits. Have we not faith enough in our cause to believe that it will lift all to its own level of patriotism and devotion? Let us, then, welcome all allies, from whatever quarter, and not inquire into their past history as minutely as if we were the assignees of the Recording Angel and could search his books at pleasure. When Soult was operating in the South of France, the defection of two German regiments crippled all his combinations and gave the advantage to Wellington. Ought Wellington to have refused their aid? For our own part, if Mr. Douglas be the best tactician, the best master of political combination, we are willing to forget all past differences and serve under him cheerfully, rather than lose the battle under a general who has agreed with us all his life. When we remember, that, of the two great cathedrals of Europe, one is dedicated to Saint Peter who denied his Lord under temptation, and the other to Saint Paul who spent his early manhood in persecuting true believers, and that both these patrons of the Church, differing as they did in many points of doctrine, were united in martyrdom for their belief, we cannot but think that there is room even for repentant renegades in the camp of the faithful.
While we insist that Morals should govern the _motives_ of political action, and that no party can be permanently strong which has not the reserve of a great principle behind it, we affirm with no less strength of conviction that the details of our National Housekeeping should be managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial guide-posts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. A siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,–a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it; we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;–it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.” We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which Nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy under the imputation.
But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry; that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change,–as if the fair hair and skin of those ancestral _non Angli sed angeli_ should crisp into wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can hold any office under the national government, however petty, without an open recantation of those principles which he drew in with his mother’s milk,–those principles which, in the better days of the republic, even a slaveholder could write down in the great charter of our liberties,–those principles which now only the bells and cannon are allowed to utter on the Fourth of July or the Seventeenth of June,–bells that may next call out the citizen-soldiery to aid in the rendition of a slave,–cannon whose brazen lips may next rebuke the freedom whose praises they but yesterday so emptily thundered.
When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared this continent for the experiment of Democracy,–when we think of those forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best blood in the day of her trial,–when we remember the first two acts of our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a new Hero to mankind,–we cannot believe it possible that this great scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent,–this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,–Plymouth and Bunker Hill,–is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,–a republic, and made it anarchy,–freedom, and were content as serfs,–of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. The change is sad ‘twixt Now and Then: the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?
We of the Free States are confessedly without our fair share of influence in the administration of national affairs. Its foreign and domestic polity are both directed by principles often hostile to our interests, sometimes abhorrent to our sense of right and honor. Under loud professions of Democracy, the powers of the central government and of the Executive have increased till they have scarcely a match among the despotisms of Europe, and more than justify the prophetic fears of practical statesmen like Samuel Adams and foresighted politicians like Jefferson. Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it. Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an Aristocracy over a Democracy? to any mental inferiority, to lack of courage, of political ability, of continuity of purpose, on our own part? We should be slow to find the cause in reasons like these; but we _do_ find it in that moral disintegration, the necessary result of that falsehood to our own sense of right forced upon us by the slave-system, and which, beginning with our public men, has gradually spread to the Press, the Pulpit, nay, worse than all, the Home, till it is hard to find a private conscience that is not tainted with the contagious mange.
For what have we not seen within the last few years? We have, seen the nomination to office made dependent, not on the candidate’s being large enough to fill, but small enough to take it. Holding the purity of elections as a first article of our creed, we have seen one-third of the population of a Territory control the other two-thirds by false or illegal votes; hereditary foes of a standing army, we have seen four thousand troops stationed in Kansas to make forged ballots good by real bullets; lovers of fair play, we have seen a cowardly rabble from the Slave States protected by Federal bayonets while they committed robbery, arson, and Sepoy atrocities against women, and the Democratic party forced to swallow this nauseous mixture of force, fraud, and Executive usurpation, under the name of Popular Sovereignty. We have seen Freedom pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the republic. We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade. We have seen the attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies. We have seen a pirate, for the hanging of whom the conscious Earth would have produced a tree, had none before existed, threaten the successor of Washington with the exposure of his complicity, if he did not publicly violate the faith he had publicly pledged.–But enough, and more than enough.
It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them. But the reform must be wide and deep, and its political objects must be attained by household means. Our sense of private honor and integrity must be quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a stain upon his own personal integrity; we must become convinced that a government without conscience is the necessary result of a people careless of their duties, and therefore unworthy of their rights. Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,–that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,–that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,–that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.
* * * * *
LITERARY NOTICES.
_Library of Old Authors_. London: John Russell Smith, 1856-7.
Many of our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young’s excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us! What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian _amphorae_ of the Past! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when yet reviews were not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved thoroughfares of thought.
Even the “Retrospective Review” continues to be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its _bouquet_ by age) which pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy chooses. The years during which this Review was published were altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old English literature. Books were prized for their imaginative, and not their antiquarian value, by young writers who sat at the feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy were sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typography. But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who substitute archaeologic perversity for aesthetic scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb tone-mellowness from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;–these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb;–in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoues and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago.
We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, “A book is a book”; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which “Bible, large, 1 vol.,” and “Bible, small, 1 vol.,” asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole _B_s in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book-case, would have no tomes in it but _porphyrogeniti_, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author’s lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, “as well as could be expected,” a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the “Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry,” or of the “Unities briefly considered by Philomusus,” of which they have never heard and never will hear so much as the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman’s library can be complete without; we see the spend-thrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial flowers of some passion which the church-yard smothered while the Stuarts were yet unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.
It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be a _florilegium_, and not a botanist’s _hortus siccus_, to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the “Library.” We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes already published are: Increase Mather’s “Remarkable Providences”; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the “Visions” of Piers Ploughman; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the “Hymns and Songs” and the “Hallelujah” of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden’s “Table-talk”; the “Enchiridion” of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston and Webster; and Chapman’s translation of Homer. The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the “Magnalia” of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham’s comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters” are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of footnotes to the works of better men,–but, with the exception of “The Fair and Happy Milkmaid,” they are dull enough to have pleased James the First; his “Wife” is a _cento_ of far-fetched conceits,–here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney’s game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity. The “Piers Ploughman” is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright’s former edition. It would have been very well to have republished the “Fair Virtue,” and “Shepherd’s Hunting” of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his “Hymns and Songs,” whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:–
“Rottenness my bones possest;
Trembling fear possessed me;
I that troublous day might rest:
For, when his approaches be
Onward to the people made,
His strong troops will them invade.”
Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David and puts into his month such punning conceits as “Fears are my feres,” and in his “Saint Peter’s Complaint” makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit’s poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their company,–to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs,–nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun’s rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary’s drawer. The “Enchiridion” of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the “Emblems,” and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,–nor a matter of heartbreak, if it were so. Of the dramatic works of Marston it is enough to say that they are truly _works_ to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor worth the paper they blot. He seems to have been deemed worthy of republication because he was the contemporary of true poets; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy his plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one. The Homer of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith’s shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast _placer_, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry.
Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith’s reprints, we come to the closer question of _How are they edited?_ Whatever the merit of the original works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by the publisher, should be accurate and scholarly. The editing of the Homer we can heartily commend; and Dr. Rimbault, who carried the works of Overbury through the press, has done his work well; but the other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English scholarship nor to English typography. The Introductions to some of them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity of reprinting our old authors because the art of writing correct and graceful English has been lost. William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction to Southwell: “There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmosphere.” (pp. xxii.-xxiii.) Again, (p. xxii.,) “He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592.” We should like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how the _objects_ of a mission could be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission itself. From the many similar flowers in the Introduction to Mather’s “Providences,” by Mr. George Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a countryman,) we select the following: “It was at this period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our pilgrim fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of men called savages, who proved more beneficent than national Christians.” To whom or what our pilgrim fathers _did_ succumb, and what “national Christians” are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of the “Providences,” Mr. Offor says, that “they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being an implicit faith in the power of the [in-]visible world to hold visible intercourse with man:–not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but of demons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and destroy,”–a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid. On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that “he was one of the first divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were considered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by deceitful juggling; that the Devil could not speak English, nor prevail with Protestants; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil; that medicine drives out Satan!” We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but we do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather’s text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not _the_ Devil) could not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that medicine drives him out.
Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic,–not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian’s head among the rest; but, _en revanche_, Mr. Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the _Civilta Cattolica_. He allows himself to say, that, “after Southwell’s death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blameably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the skill of all physicians.” Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and however it may gratify Mr. Turnbull’s catechumenical enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the expense of Jesuits’ bark, we cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero’s life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a neck-tie only to heretical readers.
Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offer’s preliminary dissertation on Witchcraft we never read; but we could hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had either not read or not understood it.
We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion because they are on the whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the others are not without grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither’s “Hallelujah,” for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that “nearly all the best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century–for that was the period when the Reformation was fully established–and the whole of the seventeenth century were sacred poets,” and that “even Shakspeare and the contemporary dramatists of his age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the songs of Zion.” Comment on statements like these would be as useless as the assertions themselves are absurd.
We have quoted these examples only to justify us in saying, that Mr. Smith must select his editors with more care, if he wishes that his “Library of Old Authors” should deserve the confidence and thereby gain the good word of intelligent readers,–without which such a series can neither win nor keep the patronage of the public. It is impossible that men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who do not know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author’s meaning; and it is more than doubtful whether they who assert carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake to do. If it were unreasonable to demand of every one who assumes to edit one of our early poets the critical acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the philological scholarship, which in combination would alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we have the right to insist upon patience and accuracy, which are within the reach of every one, and without which all the others are wellnigh vain. Now to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable sentences: “We are bound to admire,” he says, “the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of typography. Following in the path of my late friend William Pickering, our publisher rivals the Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so universally admired.” We should think that it was the product of those presses which had been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a still worthier object of admiration when he contrives to follow a path and rival a press at the same time. But let that pass;–it is the claim to accuracy which we dispute; and we deliberately affirm, that, as far as we are able to judge by the volumes we have examined, no claim more unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as we shall show presently, the blunders of the original work have been followed with painful accuracy in the reprint; but many others have been added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith’s printers or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offor’s own Introduction we have found as many as seven typographical errors,–unless some of them are to be excused on the ground that Mr. Offor’s studies have not yet led him into those arcana where we are taught such recondite mysteries of language as that verbs agree with their nominatives. In Mr. Farr’s Introduction to the “Hymns and Songs” nine short extracts from other poems of Wither are quoted, and in these we have found no less than seven misprints or false readings which materially affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blundering misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen years among literary sciolists, he says,–“The language used by Wither in all his various works–whether secular or sacred–is pure Saxon.” Taken literally, this assertion is manifestly ridiculous, and, allowing it every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither, but of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The translators of our Bible made use of the German version, and a poet versifying the English Scriptures would therefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic origin than in his original compositions. But no English poet can write English poetry except in English,–that is, in that compound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives its heartiness and strength from the one and its canorous elegance from the other. The Saxon language does not sing, and, though its tough mortar serve to hold together the less compact Latin words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that our verse owes majesty, harmony, variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on which Mr. Parr lays down his extraordinary _dictum_, and we will let this answer him, Italicizing the words of Romanic derivation:–
“Her true _beauty_ leaves behind
_Apprehensions_ in the mind,
Of more sweetness than all _art_
Or _inventions_ can _impart_;
Thoughts too deep to be _expressed_, And too strong to be _suppressed_.”
But space fails us, and we shall take up the editions of Marston and Webster in a future article.
_Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain_, etc. By DR. WAAGEN. Forming a Supplemental Volume to the “Treasures of Art in Great Britain.” 8vo. London. 1857.
The Manchester Exhibition, although containing a vast number of works of Art, displayed but a small portion of the treasures of painting and sculpture scattered through Great Britain, in the city and country houses of the upper classes. Every year is adding greatly to the number and value of both private and public galleries in England. It is but three years since Dr. Waagen published his three ponderous volumes on the “Treasures of Art in Great Britain,” and he has already found new material for a fourth, not less cumbrous than its predecessors. The larger part of this last volume is, indeed, composed of descriptions of galleries existing at the time of the publication of his first work, but the most interesting portion of it relates to the acquisitions that have been made within the last three years.
A better taste, and a truer appreciation of the relative merits of works of Art, prevails in England now than at any previous time, and the recent acquisitions are distinguished not more by their number than by their intrinsic value. The National Gallery has at last begun to make its purchases upon a systematic plan, and is endeavoring to form such a collection as shall exhibit the historic progress of the various schools of painting. The late additions to it have been of peculiar interest in this view; including some very admirable pictures by masters whose works are rare and of real importance. Among them are very noble works of some of the chief earlier Florentine, Umbrian, and Venetian masters; especially a beautiful picture by Benozzo Gozzoli, (the Virgin enthroned with the infant Saviour in her arms and surrounded by Saints,)–a thoroughly characteristic specimen of Giovanni Bellini, (also a Virgin holding the Child,) in which the deep, fervent, and tender spirit, the manly feeling, and the unsurpassed purity of color of this great master are well shown,–and one of the finest existing pictures of Perugino, the three lower and principal compartments of an altarpiece painted for the Certosa at Pavia. We know, indeed, no work by the master of Raphael to be set above this. Two of the best pictures of Paul Veronese have also just been added to the National Gallery.
Still more important are the recent private purchases. The Duke of Northumberland procured in Rome, in 1850, the whole of Camuccini’s famous collection. It contained seventy-four pictures, and many of them of great value. Among them was a small, but precious picture by Giotto,–a beautiful little Raphael,–three undoubted works of Titian,–and, most precious of all, a picture, formerly in the Ludovisi collection, painted jointly by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. It is the Descent of the Gods to taste the Fruits of the Earth, half-comic in conception, but remarkable for the grace of some of its figures; the landscape is by Titian, and Dr. Waagen says, justly, that “it is, without comparison, the finest that up to that period had ever been painted,”–and we would add, few finer have been painted since.
Meanwhile Sir Charles Eastlake has obtained a picture by Mantegna, and another by Bellini, both of which rank very high among the works of these masters, and both in excellent condition. And Mr. Alexander Barker, whose collection is becoming one of the best selected and most interesting in England, has purchased several pictures of great value, especially one by Verocchio, the master of Leonardo da Vinci, which Dr. Waagen speaks of as “the most important picture I know by this rare master.” Mr. Barker has also made an addition to his collection so recent as not to be described even in this last volume of the “Art Treasures,” but which is of unsurpassed interest. He has purchased from the Manfrini Gallery at Venice, a gallery which has long been famous as containing some of the best works of the Venetian school, eighteen of its best pictures, and was lately in treaty for a still larger number. He has already secured Titian’s portrait of Ariosto, Giorgione’s portrait of a woman with a guitar, and other works by these masters, by Palma Vecchio, Giovanni Bellini, and other chief Venetian painters. We trust that he may bring to England (if it must leave Venice) Bellini’s St. Jerome, a picture of the most precious character.
This catalogue, long as it already is, by no means completes the list of the last three years’ gains of pictures for England. Such a record shows how compact with treasures the little island is becoming. And meanwhile, what is America doing in this way? The overestimate of the importance and value of Mr. Belmont’s collection in New York shows how far the American public yet is from knowing its own ignorance and poverty in respect to Art.
No praise can be given to the execution of Dr. Waagen’s book. His descriptions of pictures are rarely characteristic; his tone and standard of judgment are worthless; his style of writing is poor; his inaccuracies frequent; and his flunkeyism intolerable. It would be an excellent undertaking for a competent person, using Dr. Waagen’s book as a basis, to compress the account of the principal private galleries, those which really contain pictures of value, into one small and portable volume,–to serve as a handbook for travellers in England, as well as for a guide to the present place of pictures interesting in the history of artists and of Art. Such a volume, if well done, would be of vastly more value than these heavy four. The usual delightful liberality of English collectors in opening their galleries to the public on certain days would make such a volume something more than a mere tantalizing exposition of treasures that could not be seen, and would render it, to all lovers of Art, an indispensable companion in England. We may add that this liberality might be imitated with advantage by the directors of some collections in which the public have a greater claim. We tried once in vain to get sight of the portraits of Alleyn and Burbage at Bulwich College, and were prevented from seeing the Hogarths in the Sloane Museum by the length of time required for the preliminary ceremonies.
_The New American Cyclopaedia._ A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge. Edited by GEORGE RIPLEY and CHAS. A. DANA. Vol. I. A–ARAGUAY. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.
The design of this work is to furnish the American public with a Cyclopaedia which shall be readable as well as valuable,–possessing all the advantages of a dictionary of knowledge for the purposes of reference, and all the interest which results from a scholarly treatment of the subjects. Judging from the first volume, it will occupy a middle ground between the great Encyclopaedias and the numerous special Dictionaries of Art and Science; and if its plan be carried out with the vigor and skill which mark its commencement, it will, when completed, be the best and most condensed Cyclopaedia for popular use in any language. The guaranty for its successful completion is to be found in the character and abilities of the editors, and the resources at their command. Mr. Ripley is an accomplished man of letters, familiar with the whole field of literature and philosophy, gifted with a mental aptitude equally for facts and ideas, a fanatic for no particular branch of knowledge, but with a genial appreciation of each, and endowed with a largeness and catholicity of mind which eminently fit him to mould the multitudinous materials of a work like the present into the form of a prescribed plan. Mr. Dana is well known as one of the chief editors of the most influential journal in the country, as combining vigorous intellect with indefatigable industry, and as capable, both in the domain of facts and in the domain of principles, of “toiling terribly.” The resources of the editors are, literally, almost too numerous to mention. They include the different Encyclopaedias and popular Conversations-Lexicons in various languages,–recent biographies, histories, books of travel, and scientific treatises,–the opportunities of research afforded by the best private and public libraries,–and a body of contributors, scattered over different portions of the United States and Europe, of whom nearly a hundred have written for the present volume, and, in some cases, have contributed the results of personal observation, research, and discovery. These contributors are selected with a view to their proficiency and celebrity in their several departments. The scientific articles are written by scientific men; those on technology and machinery, by practical machinists and engineers; those on military and naval affairs, by officers of the army and navy; and those which relate to the history and doctrines of the various Christian churches and denominations, by men who have both the knowledge of their subjects which comes from study and the knowledge which comes from sympathy.
The plan of the editors implies a perfect neutrality in regard to all controverted points in politics, science, philosophy, and religion; and though they cannot avoid controversy as a fact in the history of opinion, it is their purpose to have the Cyclopaedia give an impartial statement of various opinions without an intrusion of their own or those of their contributors. In considering how far, in the first volume, they have succeeded in their general design, it must be remembered that a Cyclopaedia which shall be satisfactory to all readers alike is an ideal which the human imagination may contemplate, but which seems to be beyond the reach of human wit practically to attain. Besides, each reader is apt to have a pet interest in certain persons, events, topics, beliefs, which stand in his own mind for universal knowledge, and he is naturally vexed to find how their importance dwindles when they appear in relation to the whole of nature and human life. In respect to Biography, especially in a Cyclopaedia which admits lives of the living as well as the dead, and to whose biographical department a great variety of authors contribute, there is an inherent difficulty of preserving the proper gradation of reputations. Doubtless, many an American gentleman will find that this Cyclopaedia gives him an importance, in comparison with the rest of the world, which time will not sanction; and doubtless, some of the dead _A_s, if rapped into utterance by the modern process of spiritual communication, would complain of the curt statement which coffined their souls in a space more limited than that now occupied by their bodies. The biographies, however, of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Addison, Aeschylus, Mark Anthony, Alfieri, Akenside, Allston, Agassiz, and a number of others, are evidently by “eminent hands,” and, as compared with the rest, are treated with more fulness and richness of detail, with an easier and more genial mastery of the subjects, and with less fear of being redundant in good things. Still, most of the biographies serve the primary purpose of the work as a book of reference, and contain as large an amount of information as could well be crammed into so limited a space.
Such a variety of minds have been engaged on the present volume, that among its twenty-five hundred articles will be found every kind of style, from austere scientific statement, to brilliant wit and fancy. Two subjects, never before included in a Cyclopaedia in the English language, namely, Aesthetics and Absolute, are ably, though far too briefly treated. Entertainment is not overlooked in the plan of the editors, and there are some articles, like those on Almacks, Actors, and Adventures, which contain information at once curious and amusing. The article “Americanism” might have been made much more valuable and pleasing, had the subject been treated at greater length, with more insight into the reasons which led to the establishment of an American verbal mint, and with a more complete list of the felicities of its coinage. The articles which refer to bodily health, such as those on Appetite, Age, Aliment, Total Abstinence, contain important facts and admirable suggestions in condensed statements. Agriculture, Agricultural Schools, and Agricultural Chemistry are evidently the work of writers who appreciate the practical wants of the farmer, as well as understand the aids which science can furnish him. Two divisions of the globe, Africa and America, come within the scope of the present volume, and, though the special reader will notice in the articles devoted to them some omissions, and some statements which may require modification, they bear the general marks of industry, vigilance, and research. The paper on Anaesthetics is evidently by a writer who meant to be impartial, but still injustice is done to the claims of Dr. Jackson, and we trust that in the next edition some of the statements will be corrected, even if the whole question of the discovery is not more thoroughly argued. It seems curious that a discovery which destroys pain should be a constant cause of pain to every person in any way connected with it. It may not be within the province of a Cyclopaedia to undertake the decision of a question still so vehemently controverted; but we think it might be so stated as to include all the facts, harmonize portions at least of the conflicting evidence, and put some people “out of pain.” We must attribute it to a careless reading of the proof-sheets that the editors have allowed the concluding paragraph in the article “Adams” to intrude village gossip into a work which should be an example to American scholarship, and not a receptacle of newspaper scandal.
In conclusion, we think that the impression which an examination of the present volume, considered as a whole, leaves on the mind is, that the editors have generally succeeded in making it both comprehensive and compact,–comprehensive without being superficial, and compact without being dry and dull. As a book for the desultory reader, it will be found full of interest and attractiveness, while it is abundantly capable of bearing severer tests than any to which the desultory reader will be likely to subject it. Minor faults can easily be detected, but we think its great merits are much more obvious than its little defects. The probability is, that, when completed, it will be found to contain articles by almost every person of literary and scientific note in the United States; for the wide and friendly relations which the editors hold with American authors and _savans_, of all sects, parties, and sections, will enable them to obtain valuable contributions, even if the general interest in the success of an American Cyclopaedia were not sufficient of itself to draw the intellect of the country to its pages. As a work which promises to be so honorable to the literature of the country, we trust that it will meet with a public patronage commensurate with its deserts.