Life Without and Life Within Part 11

UNITED STATES EXPLORING EXPEDITION.

Slight as the intercourse held by the Voyager with the South Sea Islands is, his narrative is always more prized by us than those of the missionary and traders, who, though they have better opportunity for full and candid observation, rarely use it so well, because their minds are biased towards their special objects. It is deeply interesting to us to know how much and how little G.o.d has accomplished for the various nations of the larger portion of the earth, before they are brought into contact with the civilization of Europe and the Christian religion. To suppose it so little as most people do, is to impugn the justice of Providence. We see not how any one can contentedly think that such vast mult.i.tudes of living souls have been left for thousands of years without manifold and great means of instruction and happiness. To appreciate justly how much these have availed them, to know how far they are competent to receive new benefits, is essential to the philanthropist as a means of aiding them, no less than it is important to one philosopher who wishes to see the universe as G.o.d made it, not as some men think he OUGHT TO have made it.

The want of correct knowledge, and a fair appreciation of the uncultivated man as he stands, is a cause why even the good and generous fail to aid him, and contact with Europe has proved so generally more of a curse than a blessing. It is easy enough to see why our red man, to whom the white extends the Bible or crucifix with one hand, and the rum-bottle with the other, should look upon Jesus as only one more Manitou, and learn nothing from his precepts or the civilization connected with them. The Hindoo, the South American Indian, who knew their teachers first as powerful robbers, and found themselves called upon to yield to violence not only their property, personal freedom, and peace, but also the convictions and ideas that had been rooted and growing in their race for ages, could not be otherwise than degraded and stupefied by a change effected through such violence and convulsion. But not only those who came with fire and sword, crying, "Believe or die;"

"Understand or we will scourge you;" "Understand _and_ we will only plunder and tyrannize over you,"--not only these ignorant despots, self-deceiving robbers, have failed to benefit the people they dared esteem more savage than themselves, but the worthy and generous have failed from want of patience and an expanded intelligence. Would you speak to a man? first learn his language. Would you have the tree grow?

learn the nature of the soil and climate in which you plant it. Better days are coming, we do hope, as to these matters--days in which the new shall be harmonized with the old, rather than violently rent asunder from it; when progress shall be accomplished by gentle evolution, as the stem of the plant grows up, rather than by the blasting of rocks, and blindness or death of the miners.

The knowledge which can lead to such results must be collected, as all true knowledge is, from the love of it. In the healthy state of the mind, the state of elastic youth, which would be perpetual in the mind if it were n.o.bly disciplined and animated by immortal hopes, it likes to learn just how the facts are, seeking truth for its own sake, not doubting that the design and cause will be made clear in time. A mind in such a state will find many facts ready for its use in these volumes relative to the South Sea Islanders, and other objects of interest.

STORY-BOOKS FOR THE HOT WEATHER.

Does any shame still haunt the age of bronze--a shame, the lingering blush of an heroic age, at being caught in doing any thing merely for amus.e.m.e.nt? Is there a public still extant which needs to excuse its delinquencies by the story of a man who liked to lie on the sofa all day and read novels, though he could, at time of need, write the gravest didactics? Live they still, those reverend seigniors, the object of secret smiles to our childish years, who were obliged to apologize for midnight oil spent in conning story-books by the "historic bearing" of the novel, or the "correct and admirable descriptions of certain countries, with climate, scenery, and manners therein contained," wheat, for which they, industrious students, were willing to winnow bushels of frivolous love-adventures? We know not, but incline to think the world is now given over to frivolity so far as to replace by the novel the minstrel's ballad, the drama, and even those games of agility and strength in which it once sought pastime. For, indeed, _mere_ pa.s.s-time is sometimes needed; the nursery legend comprised a primitive truth of the understanding and the wisdom of nations in the lines,--

"All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy, But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

We have reversed the order of arrangement to suit our present purpose.

For we, O useful reader! being ourselves so far of the useful cla.s.s as to be always wanted somewhere, have also to fight a good fight for our amus.e.m.e.nts, either with the foils of excuse, like the reverend seigniors above mentioned, or with the sharp weapons of argument, or maintenance of a view of our own without argument, which we take to be the sharpest weapon of all.

Thus far do we defer to the claims of the human race, with its myriad of useful errands to be done, that we read most of our novels in the long sunny days, which call all beings to chirp and nestle, or fly abroad as the birds do, and permit the very oxen to ruminate gently in the just-mown fields.

On such days it was well, we think, to read "Sybil, or the Two Worlds."

We have always felt great interest in D'Israeli. He is one of the many who share the difficulty of our era, which Carlyle says, quoting, we believe, from his Master, consists in unlearning the false in order to arrive at the true. We think these men, when they have once taken their degree, can be of far greater use to their brethren than those who have always kept their instincts unperverted.

In "Vivian Grey," the young D'Israeli, an educated Englishman, but with the blood of sunnier climes glowing and careering in his veins, gave us the very flower and essence of fact.i.tious life. That book sparkled and frothed like champagne; like that, too, it produced no dull and imbecile state by its intoxication, but one witty, genial, spiritual even. A deep, soft melancholy thrilled through its gay mockeries; the eyes of nature glimmered through the painted mask, and a n.o.bler ambition was felt beneath the follies of petty success and petty vengeance. Still, the chief merit of the book, as a book, was the light and decided touch with which its author took up the follies and poesies of the day, and brought them all before us. The excellence of the foreign part, with its popular superst.i.tions, its deep pa.s.sages in the glades of the summer woods, and above all, the capital sketch of the prime minister with his original whims and secret history of romantic sorrows, were beyond the appreciation of most readers.

Since then, D'Israeli has never written any thing to be compared with this first jet of the fountain of his mind in the sunlight of morning.

The "Young Duke" was full of brilliant sketches, and showed a soul struggling, blinded by the gaudy mists of fas.h.i.+on, for realities. The "Wondrous Tale of Alroy" showed great power of conception, though in execution it is a failure. "Henrietta Temple" Mr. Willis, with his usual justness of perception, has praised, as containing a collection of the best love-letters ever written; and which show that excellence, signal and singular among the literary tribe, of which D'Israeli never fails, of daring to write a thing down exactly as it rises in his mind.

Now he has come to be a leader of Young England, and a rooted plant upon her soil. If the performance of his prime do not entirely correspond with the brilliant lights of its dawn, it is yet aspiring, and with a large kernel of healthy n.o.bleness in it. D'Israeli shows now not only the heart, but the soul of a man. He cares for all men; he wishes to care wisely for all.

"Coningsby" was full of talent, yet its chief interest lay in this aspiration after reality, and the rich materials taken from contemporary life. There is nothing in it good after the original manner of D'Israeli, except the sketches of Eton, and above all, the n.o.ble schoolboy's letter. The picture of the Jew, so elaborately limned, is chiefly valuable as affording keys to so many interesting facts.

"Sybil" is an attempt to do justice to the claims of the laboring cla.s.ses, and investigate the duties of those in whose hands the money is at present, towards the rest. It comes to no result: it only exhibits some truths in a more striking light than heretofore. D'Israeli shows the taint of old prejudice in the necessity he felt to marry the daughter of the people to one _not_ of the people. Those worthy to be distinguished must still have good blood, or rather old blood, for what is called good needs now to be renovated from a homelier source. But his leaders must have _old_ blood; the fresh ichor, the direct flow from heaven, is not enough to animate their lives to the deeds now needed.

D'Israeli is another of those who give testimony in behalf of our favorite idea that a leading feature of the new era will be in new and higher developments of the feminine character. He looks at women as a man does who is truly in love. He does not paint them well, that is, not with profound fidelity to nature. But, ideally, he sees them well, for they are to him the inspirers and representatives of what is holy, tender, and simply great.

There are good sketches of the manufacturers at home, not the overseers, but the real makers.

Sue is a congenial activity with D'Israeli, but with clearer notions of what he wants. His "De Rohan" is a poor book, though it contains some things excellent. But it is faulty,--even more so than is usual with him, in heavy exaggerations, and is less redeemed by brilliant effects, good schemes, and lively strains of feeling. The wish to unmask Louis XIV. is defeated by the hatred with which the character inspired him, the liberal of the nineteenth century. The Grand Monarque was really brutally selfish and ignorant, as Sue represents him; but then there _was_ a native greatness, which justified, in some degree, the illusion he diffused, and which falsifies all Sue's representation. It is not by an inventory of facts or traits that what is most vital in character, and which makes its due impression on contemporaries, can be apprehended or depicted. "De Rohan" is worth reading for particulars of an interesting period, put together with accuracy and with a sense of physiological effects, if not of the spiritual realities that they represented.

"Self, by the Author of Cecil," is one of the worst of a paltry cla.s.s of novels--those which aim at representing the very dregs in a social life, now at its lowest ebb. If it has produced a sensation, that only shows the poverty of life among those who can be interested in it. I have known more life lived in a day among factory girls, or in a village school, than informs these volumes, with all their great pretension and affected vivacity. It is not worth our while to read this cla.s.s of English novels; they are far worse than the French, morally as well as mentally. This has no merits as to the development of character or exposition of motives; it is a poor, external, lifeless thing.

"Dashes at Life," by N. P. Willis. The life of Mr. Willis is too European for him to have a general or permanent fame in America. We need a life of our own, and a literature of our own. Those writers who are dearest to us, and really most interesting, are those who are at least rooted to the soil. If they are not great enough to be the prophets of the new era, they at least exhibit the features of their native clime, and the complexion given by its native air. But Mr. Willis is a son of Europe, and his writings can interest only the fas.h.i.+onable world of this country, which, by imitating Europe, fails entirely of a genius, grace, and invention of its own. Still, in their way, they are excellent. They are most lively pictures, showing the fine natural organization of the writer, on whom none, the slightest symptom of what he is looking for, is thrown away; sparkling with bold, light wit, succinct, and colored with glow, and for a full light. Some of them were new to us, and we read them through, missing none of the words, and laughed with a full heart, and without one grain of complaisance, which is much, very much, to say in these days. We said these sketches would not have a permanent fame, and yet we may be wrong. The new, full, original, radiant, American life may receive them as an heirloom from this transition state we are in now, and future generations may stare at the mongrel products of Saratoga, and maidens still laugh till they cry at the "Letter of Jane S. to her Spirit-Bridegroom."

All these story-books show, even to the languor of the hottest day, the solemn signs of revolution. Life has become too fact.i.tious; it has no longer a leg left to stand upon, and cannot be carried much farther in this way. England--ah! who can resist visions of phalansteries in every park, and the treasures of art turned into public galleries for the use of the artificers who will no longer be unwashed, but raised and educated by the refinements of sufficient leisure, and the instructions of genius. England must glide, or totter, or fall into revolution; there is not room for such selfish elves, and unique young dukes, in a country so crowded with men, and with those who ought to be women, and are turned into work-tools. There are very impressive hints on this last topic in "Sybil, or the Two Worlds," (of the rich and poor.) G.o.d has time to remember the design with which he made this world also.

Sh.e.l.lEY'S POEMS[18]

We are very glad to see this handsome copy of Sh.e.l.ley ready for those who have long been vainly inquiring at all the bookstores for such a one.

In Europe the fame of Sh.e.l.ley has risen superior to the clouds that darkened its earlier days, hiding his true image from his fellow-men, and from his own sad eyes oftentimes the common light of day. As a thinker, men have learned to pardon what they consider errors in opinion for the sake of singular n.o.bleness, purity, and love in his main tendency or spirit. As a poet, the many faults of his works having been acknowledged, there are room and place to admire his far more numerous and exquisite beauties.

The heart of the man, few, who have hearts of their own, refuse to reverence, and many, even of devoutest Christians, would not refuse the book which contains Queen Mab as a Christmas gift. For it has been recognized that the founder of the Christian church would have suffered one to come unto him, who was in faith and love so truly what he sought in a disciple, without regard to the form his doctrine a.s.sumed.

The qualities of his poetry have often been a.n.a.lyzed, and the severer critics, impatient of his exuberance, or unable to use their accustomed spectacles in the golden mist that broods over all he has done, deny him high honors; but the soul of aspiring youth, untrammelled by the canons of taste, and untamed by scholarly discipline, swells into rapture at his lyric sweetness, finds ambrosial refreshment from his plenteous fancies, catches fire at his daring thought, and melts into boundless weeping at his tender sadness--the sadness of a soul betrothed to an ideal unattainable in this present sphere.

For ourselves, we dispute not with the _doctrinaires_ or the critics. We cannot speak dispa.s.sionately of an influence that has been so dear to us. Nearer than the nearest companions of life actual has Sh.e.l.ley been to us. Many other great ones have shone upon us, and all who ever did so s.h.i.+ne are still resplendent in our firmament, for our mental life has not been broken and contradictory, but thus far we "see what we foresaw." But Sh.e.l.ley seemed to us an incarnation of what was sought in the sympathies and desires of instinctive life, a light of dawn, and a foreshowing of the weather of this day.

When still in childish years, the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" fell in our way. In a green meadow, skirted by a rich wood, watered by a lovely rivulet, made picturesque by a mill a little farther down, sat a party of young persons gayer than, and almost as inventive, as those that told the tales recorded by Boccaccio. They were pa.s.sing a few days in a scene of deep seclusion, there uncared for by tutor or duenna, and with no bar of routine to check the pranks of their gay, childish fancies. Every day they a.s.sumed parts which through the waking hours must be acted out. One day it was the characters in one of Richardson's novels; and most solemnly we "my deared" each other with richest brocade of affability, and interchanged in long, stiff phrase our sentimental secrets and prim opinions. But to-day we sought relief in personating birds or insects; and now it was the Libellula who, tired of wild flitting and darting, rested on the gra.s.sy bank and read aloud the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," torn by chance from the leaf of a foreign magazine.

It was one of those chances which we ever remember as the interposition of some good angel in our fate. Solemn tears marked the change of mood in our little party and with the words

"Have I not kept my vow?"

began a chain of thoughts whose golden links still bind the years together.

Two or three years pa.s.sed. The frosty Christmas season came; the trees cracked with their splendid burden of ice, the old wooden country house was banked up with high drifts of the beautiful snow, and the Libellula became the owner of Sh.e.l.ley's Poems. It was her Christmas gift, and for three days and three nights she ceased not to extract its sweets; and how familiar still in memory every object seen from the chair in which she sat enchanted during those three days, memorable to her as those of July to the French nation! The fire, the position of the lamp, the variegated shadows of that alcoved room, the bright stars up to which she looked with such a feeling of congeniality from the contemplation of this starry soul,--O, could but a De Quincey describe those days in which the bridge between the real and ideal rose unbroken! He would not do it, though, as _Suspiria de Profundis_, but as sighs of joy upon the mountain height.

The poems we read then are what every one still reads, the "Julian and Maddalo," with its profound revelations of the inward life; "Alastor,"

the soul sweeping like a breeze through nature; and some of the minor poems. "Queen Mab," the "Prometheus," and other more formal works we have not been able to read much. It was not when he tried to express opinions which the wrongs of the world had put into his head, but when he abandoned himself to the feelings which nature had implanted in his own breast, that Sh.e.l.ley seemed to us so full of inspiration, and it is so still.

In reply to all that can be urged against him by people of whom we do not wish to speak ill,--for surely "they know not what they do,"--we are wont simply to refer to the fact that he was the only man who redeemed the human race from suspicion to the embittered soul of Byron. "Why,"

said Byron, "he is a man who would willingly die for others. _I am sure of it._"

Yes! balance that against all the ill you can think of him that he was a man able to live wretched for the sake of speaking sincerely what he supposed to be truth, willing to die for the good of his fellows!

Mr. Foster has spoken well of him as a man: "Of Sh.e.l.ley's personal character it is enough to say that it was wholly pervaded by the same unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men--the same holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and happiness--the same scorn of baseness and hatred of oppression--which beam forth in all his writings with a pure and constant light. The theory which he wrote was the practice which his whole life exemplified. n.o.ble, kind, generous, pa.s.sionate, tender, with a courage greater than the courage of the chief of warriors, for it could _endure_--these were the qualities in which his life was embalmed."

FESTUS.[19]

We are right glad to see this beloved stranger domesticated among us.

Yet there are queer little circ.u.mstances that herald the introduction.

The poet is a barrister at law!--well! it is always worthy of note when a man is not hindered by study of human law from knowledge of divine; which last is all that concerns the poet. Then the preface to the American edition closes with this discreet remark: "It is perfectly SAFE to p.r.o.nounce it (the poem) one of the most powerful and splendid productions of the age." Dear New England! how purely that was worthy thee, region where the tyranny of public opinion is carried to a perfection of minute scrutiny beyond what it ever was before in any age or place, though the ostracism be administered with the mildness and refinement fit for this age. Dear New England! yes! it is _safe_ to say that the poem is good; whatever Mrs. Grundy may think, she will not have it burned by the hangman if it is not. But it may not be _discreet_, because she can, if she sees fit, exile its presence from bookstores, libraries, centre tables, and all mention of its existence from lips polite, and of thine also, who hast dared to praise it, on peril of turning all surrounding eyes to lead by its utterance. This kind of gentle excommunication thou mayst not be prepared to endure, O preface-writer! And we should greatly fear that thou wert deceived in thy fond security, for "Festus" is a bold book--in respect of freedom of words, a boldest book--also it reveals the solitudes of hearts with unexampled sincerity, and remorselessly lays bare human nature in its naked truth--but for the theology of the book. That may save it, and none the less for all it shows of the depravity of human nature. It is through many pages and leaves what is technically praised as "a serious book." A friend went into a bookstore to select presents for persons with whom she was about to part, and among other things requested the shopman to "show her some serious books in handsome binding." He looked into several, and then, struck by pa.s.sages here and there, offered her the "Letters of Lady M. W. Montague." She a.s.suring him that it would not be safe to make use of this work, he offered her a miniature edition of Shakspeare, as "a book containing many excellent things, though you had to wade through a great deal of rubbish to get at them."