Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863», страница 15

A position precisely similar, in its main features, does Republican America hold to-day. She has established her own freedom against all European intrusion; and in her efforts to do this she arrived at political union as an indispensable necessity, and merged all separate interests in a common one. That interest, already vindicated for herself, has become world-wide in its meaning; so that, in virtue of what she has accomplished in the cause of freedom, she takes an authoritative position of leadership in modern civilization. And what is it that hinders the fulfilment of her exalted mission? She, too, has been flanked in her march by a traitor within her own borders; against her, and doing violence to her high office, are opposed the backward-tending elements of barbarism, which, if not immediately neutralized, if not summarily crushed, will drag her to the lowest stages of weakness and exhaustion.

A very minute parallel might be, drawn between the opposing civilizations that are to-day in this country contending for the mastery and those which were engaged in a similar conflict in the days of Pericles. New England would be found to be the Attica of America; while, on the other hand, the Southrons would most exactly correspond to the ancient Lacedaemonians. As the Cavaliers who first settled Virginia helped on the Puritan exodus, so did the Dorians that settled Sparta, through the tumult of their overwhelming invasion, drive the Ionians from their old homes to the barren wastes of Attica,—barren as compared with the fertile valleys of the Eurotas, just as New England would be considered sterile when contrasted with Virginia or the Valley of the Mississippi. Like the Ionian Greeks, the "Yankees" stand before the world as the recognized advocates and supporters of a pure democracy. The descendants of the Cavaliers, on the contrary, join hands, as did the ancient Dorians, in favor of an oligarchy, and of an oligarchy, too, based on the institution of slavery. Upon this difference rested the political dissensions of Greece, as do now those of our own country. The negro plays no more important part in the difference between the North and South than did the Helot in the contests between the Spartans and the Athenians. It is not in either case the simple fact of human slavery which necessitates the civil strife, but it is the radical opposition between a government that is founded upon slavery and one which is not. The Athenians had slaves; and so, for that matter, might New England have to-day: yet, for all that, the civil strife would have been inevitable, because both in Greece and America this strife evidently arises out of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all, exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as a peculiar institution, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity, must come into conflict with the totally opposite institutions of democracy, and that not because it is merely or nominally slavery, but because it is a political organ modifying the entire structure of government. Slavery, as it existed in Athens, slavery, as it existed formerly in the Northern States, was in everything, except its name and accidents, consistent with democracy; and, in either case, to dispense with the institution was to introduce no radical change, but only to do away with the name and accidents.¹⁹

In Sparta, or in the South, the case was far otherwise. Here, slavery existed in its strict severity; it came into being in connection with material conditions,—that is, in connection with a soil especially favorable to agriculture,—and it maintained its existence by reason of its fitness, its indispensableness, to certain social conditions; it could not, therefore, be changed or annulled without running counter both to the inveterate tendencies of Nature and the still more inveterate tendencies of habit. This difference between the two estates of slavery is evident also from the fact, that, while, in the one case, the law would admit of no emancipation, in the other, the emancipation was effected legally, either in the lump, as in New England, or by instalments, as in Athens; and in the latter State we must remember that the process was rendered the more easy and natural by the fact that the slaves were, in the first instance, generally prisoners taken in war, and not unfrequently stood upon the same social level, before their capture, with their captors, while in Sparta the slaves were taken as a subject race, and held as inferiors.

Much glory has been given to Lacedaemon on the score of her martial merits. To ourselves this glory seems rather her shame, since these merits are inseparable from her grand political mistake. We might as justly exalt Feudalism on the ground of its military establishment, which, after all, we must admit to be an absolute necessity in the system. To the Spartan oligarchy it was equally necessary that the whole State should exist perpetually under martial law. In the first place, it was necessary, if for nothing else, for the intimidation of the Helots, who were continually watching their opportunity for insurrection, as is shown in that memorable attempt made in connection with the Messenian War. It was, moreover, necessary for a government not strong by sea to extend its boundaries by military conquest; for by each successive conquest a possible enemy is actually forced into subjection, and made to contribute to the central power which subdues it.

Indeed, it is true that every feature of the State polity which that old rascal Lycurgus gave to Sparta must be considered and judged in connection with this grand martial establishment, upon which the Lacedaemonian oligarchy was based, and through which the nefarious attempt to establish oligarchies in all the rest of the world was supported. The establishment itself was barbarous, and could not possibly have thrived under the art-loving, home-protecting eye of the Athenian Pallas. All domestic sanctities were rudely invaded, and even the infant's privilege to live depended upon its martial promise; the aspirations of religion were levelled down into sympathy with the most brutal enthusiasm, as afterwards happened in the case of Rome; the very idea of Beauty was demolished, and with it all that was sacred in human nature, and all hope of progress. The whole State was sacred to the idea of Military Despotism.

Thus it happened that Sparta, from her first introduction in history to her exit, was at a stand-still in whatever involved anything higher than brute force. In this respect she differed from Athens as much as the South at this day differs from the North, and from precisely the same causes, the principal of which, in each case, was barbarism,—barbarism deliberately organized, and maintained in conscious preference to intellectual refinement.

And yet it is remarkable that both Lacedaemon and the South, as compared with their respective rivals, started in life at an immense advantage, and seemingly with a far more auspicious prospect before them. The early Virginian turned up his nose at Plymouth as a very despicable affair, and wondered that the Puritans did not set sail en masse for the Bahamas. Gorgeous were the descriptions of Virginia sent home by some of the first settlers, in which lions and tigers, and a whole menagerie of tropical animals, came in for no small share of wonder; and, as an offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,—and even that which was the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the abundance of fish in the sea, was, as respects the revenue derived from it, made an especial subject of derision. Thus, doubtless, did the ancient Peloponnesian look upon Attica in the small beginnings of her infinite growth; he had exactly the same topics for his ridicule,—sterility, fishery, and all; and just as in the case of the South, was the laugh in the end turned against himself. But to the very last there was one stinging jest on the lips of the Spartan,—the very same which the modern slaveholder flings with so great gusto against the unfortunate Yankee,—and that was Athenian cupidity. The ancient and the modern jester are alike condemned on their own indictment, since upon cupidity the most petulant, upon cupidity the most voracious in its greedy demands, rested the whole Spartan polity, as does the system of slaveholding in the South. The Spartan, like the Southern planter, might protest that money was of no consequence whatever, that to him it was only so much iron,—but why? Only because that, by the satisfaction of a cupidity more profound, he was able to dispense with the ordinary necessities of an honest democrat.

In peace, Sparta was a nonentity; in the resources which enrich and glorify the time of peace she was a bankrupt. Fine arts or education she had none: these centred in Athens. These were elements of progress, and could no more be tolerated in Peloponnesus than in our Gulf States. Taking our Southern civilization or that of Lacedaemon, we must say of each that it is thoroughly brutalized; we may challenge either to show us a single master-piece of intellect, whether in the way of analysis or of construction,—but none can they show.

Even in a military sense, the forces which Democracy could marshal, either in ancient Greece or in modern America, were more than a match for the corresponding oligarchical factions. Athens, like New England, was a commercial centre, and therefore a prominent naval power; and this naval prominence, in each instance, was so great as to give a decisive superiority over a non-commercial rival. Sparta used her influence and power to establish oligarchic institutions in the various provinces of Greece, which generally corresponded to our Territories,—in which latter the South has, with an equally unworthy zeal, been for several years seeking to establish her peculiar institutions. Epidamnus proved a Grecian Kansas. As in our own country, the hostile factions refrained from war as long as human nature would allow; but, once engaged in it, it became a vital struggle, that could be terminated only by the exhaustion of one of the parties.

Athens was the stronger: why, then, did she not conquer her rival? With equal pertinence we might ask, Why have not we, who are the stronger, subjugated the South? The answer to both questions is the same. Political prejudice overmasters patriotism. Neither ourselves nor the ancient Athenians appear to have the remotest idea of the importance of the cause for which we are contending. To us, as to them, the avenue to future glory lies through the blood-red path of war, of desperate, unrelenting war. Nothing else, no compromise, no negotiations of any sort, would suffice. This the Athenians never realized; this we do not seem to understand. Among ourselves, as among them, the peace-party—a party in direct sympathy with the aims and purposes of the enemy—blusters and intrigues. President Lincoln meets with the same embarrassments in connection with this party that Pericles met in his campaigns against Sparta: it was his coming into power that precipitated the violence of war; his determined action against all sympathizers with the enemy draws down upon him the intensified wrath of these sympathizers; the generals whom he sends into the field, if, like Alcibiades, they are characterized by any spirit in their undertakings, are trammelled with political entanglements and rendered useless, while some slow, half-brained Nicias, with no heart in the cause, is placed at the head of expeditions that result only in defeat.

There is the same diffusiveness connected with our military plans which characterized the operations of the Athenians against Sparta. We do not make the special advantage which we have over the South through our naval superiority available against her special vulnerability. We intimidate her, as Pericles did the Peloponnesians, by circumnavigating her territories with a great display of our naval power; we effect a few landings upon her coasts; but all these invasions lead to no grand results, they do not subdue our armed enemy. What with these errors in the general conduct of the war, and the lack of energy which characterizes every part, our prospects of ultimate success are fast being ruined. Unless some change be quickly effected, unless political sentiment can be made to give place to the original enthusiasm with which we commenced the war, and this enthusiasm be embodied in military enterprise, our case is a hopeless one. One the other hand, if things go on as they have been going on, the political opposition to the war will rise to such a height as to overturn the Administration, and in its place install those who are desirous of a reconstruction of the Union on a Southern basis. The same errors on the part of Athens led to just this result in Greece; an oligarchy came at last to rule even over the democratic city itself. The consequence was the downfall of Greece, and in her ruin was demonstrated the failure of ancient civilization. In a like event, nothing could save us, nothing could save modern civilization, from the same disastrous ruin.

The barbarism which at successive intervals in history has swept southward over Asia was, at the least, something fresher and better than that which it displaced. The Gothic barbarians were, in very truth, the scourges of God to the inferior and more despicable barbarians of Southern Europe. The former exemplified a barbarism unconscious of itself, and carrying in its very rudeness the hope of the world; and the more complete and overwhelming its revolutions, the more glorious the promise involved in them. But, from the establishment over a continent of a system so deliberately barbarous that it dares to array its brutal features against the sunlight of this nineteenth century, that it dares even to oppose itself, with a distinct confession of its base purposes, against the only free, beneficent, and hope-giving government in the world,—from the triumph of such a system and over such a government there is not the shadow of a hope, but rather the widest possible field for dismal apprehension. From this barbarism we have everything to fear; and the only way to successfully oppose it is through the movements of war. Only through a triumph gained in the battle-field, and held decisive for all future time, can we, as a nation, make our way out of the fatal entanglements of this present time into the bright and glorious heritage of the future.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

My Diary, North and South. By W.H. RUSSELL. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, pp. xxii., 602.

Plutarch, as a patriotic Boeotian, felt called on to write a tract concerning the malice of Herodotus in having told some unpleasant truths about the Thebans; and many of our countrymen have shown themselves as Boeotian, at least, if not as patriotic, in their diatribes against Mr. Russell, who is certainly very far from being an Herodotus, least of all in that winning simplicity of style which made him so dangerous in the eyes of Plutarch. It was foolish to take Mr. Russell at his own valuation, to elevate a clever Irish reporter of the London "Times" into a representative of England; but it was still more foolish, in attacking him, to mistake violence for force, and sensible people will be apt to think that there must have been some truth in criticisms which were resented with such unreasoning clamor. It is only too easy to force the growth of those national antipathies which ripen the seeds of danger and calamity to mankind; for there are few minds that are not capacious enough for a prejudice, and it has sometimes seemed as if, in our hasty resentment of the littlenesses of Englishmen, we were in danger of forgetting the greatness of England. A nation risks nothing in being underrated; the real peril is in underrating and misunderstanding a rival who may at any moment become an antagonist,—who will almost certainly become such, if we do our best to help him in it. Especially in judging the qualities of a people, we should be careful to take our measure by the highest, and not the lowest, types it has shown itself capable of producing. In moments of alarm, danger, or suffering, a nation is apt to relapse into that intellectual and moral condition of Mob from which it has slowly struggled upward; and this is especially true in an age of newspapers, where Cleon finds his way to every breakfast-table. It is her mob side that England has been showing us lately; but this should not blind us to the fact that in the long run the character of a nation tends more and more to assimilate itself to that ideal typified in its wisest thinkers and best citizens. In the qualities which historians and poets love to attribute to their country, national tendencies and aspirations are more or loss consciously represented; these qualities the nation will by-and-by learn to attribute to itself, until, becoming gradually traditional, they will at length realize themselves as active principles. The selfish clamor of Liverpool merchants, who see a rival in New York, and of London bankers who have dipped into Confederate stock, should not lead us to conclude, with M. Albert Blanc, that the foreign policy of England is nothing more or less than une haine de commerçants et d'industriels, haine implacable et inflexible comme les chiffres.²⁰

Mr. Russell's book purports to be, and probably is in substance, the diary from which he made up his letters to the London "Times"; and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of "the leading journal of Europe." When we learn, as we do from this "Diary," what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his own devices,—that he does not know the difference between would and should, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he believes in petto to mean in miniature, uses protagonist with as vague a notion of its sense as Mrs. Malaprop had of her derangement of epitaphs, and then recall to mind the comparative correctness of Mr. Russell's correspondence in point of style, we conceive a hearty respect for the proof-reader in Printing-House Square. We should hardly have noticed these trifles, except that Mr. Russell has a weakness for displaying the cheap jewelry of what we may call lingo, and that he is rather fond of criticizing the dialect and accent of persons who were indiscreet enough to trust him with their confidences. There is one respect, however, in which the matter has more importance,—in its bearing on our estimate of Mr. Russell as a trustworthy reporter of what he saw and heard. Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty; so that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning, and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant, we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind, which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer and reporter. We say this with no intention of imputing any wilful misstatements to Mr. Russell, but as something to be borne in mind while reading his record of private conversations. A scrupulous fidelity is absolutely essential, where the whole meaning may depend on a tone of voice or the use of one word instead of another. Any one accustomed to the study of dialects will understand what we mean, if he compare Mr. Olmsted's extracts from his diary with Mr. Russell's. The latter represents himself as constantly hearing the word Britisher used seriously and in good faith, and remarks expressly on an odd pronunciation of Europe with the accent on the last syllable, which be noticed in Mr. Seward among others. Mr. Russell's memory is at fault. What he heard was Európean; and Britisher is not, and never was, an Americanism.

We do not, however, mean to doubt the general truthfulness of Mr. Russell's reports. We find nothing in his book which leads us to modify the opinion we expressed of him more than a year ago.²¹ We still think him "a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer." We still believe that his "strictures, if rightly taken, may do us infinite service." But we must enter our earnest protest against a violation of hospitality and confidence, which, if it became common, would render all society impossible. Any lively man might write a readable and salable book by exploiting his acquaintances; but such a proceeding would be looked upon by all right-minded people as an offence similar in kind, if not in degree, to the publication of private letters. A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in a foreign country should always know two things,—what he is, and where he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all. we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a hundred and fifty years after his death.

One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr. Russell's book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall pay his travelling-charges. The object which men formerly proposed to themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,—and they treated of manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and impartiality of naturalists: They did not conclude things to be necessarily worse because they were different. A modern Tom Coryat, instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would find some excuse for thinking the Italians a nasty people because they used it. In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a traveller was to discover (or where that failed, to invent) all that he possibly can to the disadvantage of the country he visits; and he is so scrupulous a censor of individual manners that he has no eyes left for national characteristics. Another striking difference between the older traveller and his modern successor is that the observer and the object to be observed seem to have reversed their relations to each other, so that the man, with his sensations, prejudices, and annoyances, fills up the greater part of the book, while the foreign country becomes merely incidental, a sort of canvas, on which his own portrait is to be painted for the instruction of his readers. Pliny used to say that something was to be learned from the worst book; and accordingly let us be thankful to the voyagers of the last thirty years that they have taught us where we can get the toughest steak and the coldest coffee which this world offers to the diligent seeker after wisdom, and have made us intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of the fleas, if with those of none of the other dwellers in every corner of the globe. Such interesting particulars, to be sure, may claim a kind of classic authority in Horace's journey to Brundusium; but perhaps a gnat or a frog that kept Horace awake may fairly assume a greater historical importance than would be granted to similar tormentors of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Were it not for Mr. Olmsted, we should conclude the Arthur-Young type of traveller to be extinct, and that people go abroad merely for an excuse to write about themselves,—it is so much easier to write a clever book than a solid one. The plan of Montaigne, who wrote his travels round himself without stirring beyond his library, was as much wiser and cheaper as the result was more entertaining.

But, apart from the self-consciousness and impertinence which detract so much from the value of most recent books of travel, it may be doubted whether, since the French Revolution gave birth to the Caliban of Democracy, there has been a tourist without political bias toward one side or the other; and now that the "Special Correspondent" has been invented, whose business it is to be one-sided, if possible, and at all events entertaining, the last hope of rational information from anywhere would seem to be cut off. And of all travellers, the Englishman is apt to be the worst. What Fuller said of him two centuries ago is still in the main true,—that, "though some years abroad, he is never out of England." He carries with him an ideal England, made up of all that is good, great, refined, and, above all, "in easy circumstances," by which to measure the short-comings of other less-favored nations. He may have dined contentedly for years at the "Cock" or the "Mitre," but he must go first to Paris or New York to be astonished at dirt or to miss napkins. He may have been the life-long victim of the London cabby, but he first becomes aware of extortion as he struggles with the porters of Avignon or the hackmen of Jersey City. We are not finding fault with this insularity as a feature of national character,—on the contrary, we rather like it, for the first business of an Englishman is to be an Englishman, and we wish that Americanism were as common among Americans,—but, since no man can see more than is in his own mind, it is a somewhat dangerous quality in a traveller. Moreover, the Englishman in America is at a double disadvantage; for his understanding the language leads him to think that everything is easy to understand, while at the same time he cannot help looking on every divergence of manners or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability," and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels upward,—of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which has only to enjoy and not to endure them. The travels of an average Englishman are generally little more than a "Why, bless me, you don't say so! how very extraordinary!" in two volumes octavo.

Mr. Russell is only an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists. In range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr. Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope soon to see published in a collected form; but he had opportunities, especially in the Seceding States, such as did not fall, and indeed could not have fallen, to the lot of any other man. As the representative of an English journal, he was welcomed by the South, eager to show him its best side; as a foreigner, his impressions were fresh and vivid; and his report of the condition of things there is the only even presumably trustworthy one we have had since the beginning of the Rebellion. The New England States, he tells us, he did not visit; but that does not prevent his speaking glibly of their "bloody-minded and serious people," and of the "frigid intellectuality" of Boston, about both of which he knows as little as of Juvenal. This should serve to put us on our guard against some of his other generalizations, which may be based on premises as purely theoretic. But it is not in generalizations that Mr. Russell is strong, nor, to do him justice, does he often indulge in them,—always excepting, of course, the ex officio one which he owes his employers, and which he was sent out to find arguments for, that the Union is irrevocably split asunder. It is as a reporter that he has had his training, and it is as a reporter that he is valuable. Quick to catch impressions, and from among them to single out the taking parts, his sketches of what he saw and heard, if without any high artistic merit, have a coarse truth that will make them of worth to the future student of these times. They are all the better that Mr. Russell was unable, from the nature of the case, to elaborate and Timesify them.

The first half of the book is both the most interesting and the most valuable,—the second half being so largely made up of personal grievances (which, if Mr. Russell had not the dignity to despise them, he might at least have been wise enough to be silent about) as to be tedious in comparison. We regret that Mr. Russell should have been subjected to so many personal indignities for having written what we believe to have been as impartial an account of what he saw of the panic-rout which followed the Battle of Manassas as any one could have written under the same conditions,—though we doubt if the correspondent of a French newspaper would come off much better, under like circumstances, in England. It is not beyond the memory of man that the Duke of Wellington himself was pelted in London. But we are surprised that Mr. Russell should have so far misapprehended his position, should have so readily learned to look upon himself as an ambassador, (we believe the "Times" is not yet recognized by our Government as anything more than a belligerent power,) as to consider it a hardship that he was not allowed to accompany General McClellan's army to the Peninsula. He seems to have thought that every thing happens in America, as La Rochefoucauld said of France. We are sorry that he was not permitted to go, for he would have helped us to some clearer understanding of a campaign about whose conduct and results there seems to be plenty of passionate misjudgment and very little real knowledge. But when should we hear the last of the vulgar presumption of an American reporter who should try to hitch himself in the same way to the staff of a British army?