Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864», страница 18

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We regret, also, that in a book by Bayard Taylor there should have been found room for such a paragraph as this:—

"The churches in the village undertook their periodical 'revivals,' which absorbed the interest of the community while they lasted. It was not the usual season in Ptolemy for such agitations of the religious atmosphere,—but the Methodist clergyman, a very zealous and impassioned speaker, having initiated the movement with great success, the other sects became alarmed lest he should sweep all the repentant sinners of the place into his own fold. As soon as they could obtain help from Tiberius, the Baptists followed, and the Rev. Lemuel Styles was constrained to do likewise. For a few days the latter regained the ground he had lost, and seemed about to distance his competitors. Luckily for him,… the material for conversion, drawn upon from so many different quarters, was soon exhausted; but the rival churches stoutly held out, until convinced that neither had any further advantage to gain over the other."

No one who has given to the religious phenomena of the day the smallest degree of intellectual and sympathetic attention can fail to pronounce this a gross and ill-bred caricature. Ridicule is the legitimate weapon of Truth; but ridicule that strikes rudely and indiscriminately, wounding without benefiting, is not found in the hands of Christian courtesy. We regret these blemishes, and such as these, the more because we are persuaded that the effects produced were not intended by the author. We believe, not only from his previous reputation, but from the spirit of the book, which warms, deepens, and clarifies itself as it goes on, that he aimed only at results pure, healthful, and desirable. It is by no design of his, that young feet, already wavering downward, will not be strengthened to pause, to turn, to steady themselves, but will rather be lured on by his words. It is no purpose of his to make the crusts of Materialism harden still more hopelessly above the stifled soul. He designs to ridicule only that which is ridiculous. There are evidences of a purpose to relieve the darkness of his coloring in each instance by lines of light, but it is not made palpable enough for running readers. He has seen the weakness that generally develops itself in, and the hypocrisy that almost invariably clings to the skirts of a great popular movement, and it is these alone which he aims to bring down. In this he is right. He errs in that his vision is neither clear nor broad. He does not always wisely discriminate as to the nature or extent of the disease, or the effect of the remedy which he applies. The cause of the difficulty has baffled his researches. The people upon whom his strictures fall, and to whom strictures belong, will be inflamed, but they will not be enlightened; and they who do see the real nature of the movement, its bane as well as its blessing, and who are constantly laboring to separate the chaff from the wheat, will not be helped, but hindered, by his well-meant efforts.

But, as we intimated, the book, like fame, increases in going. Under all the wit and humor, which are often very charming, under all the satire, which is none the less enjoyable because occasionally half-hidden, under the somewhat multifarious machinery, which the peculiar structure of the book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman "strong-minded," austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of "woman's rights." True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by the highest motives, and guided by the highest principles. But the conjunction of these two classes of qualities in one person is the real Malakoff. That accomplished and the work is done. In this conception lies the true originality of the book. In this attempt lies the true consciousness of power. He who can make his hero say,—"It was my profound appreciation of those very elements in your character which led you to take up these claims of woman and make them your own, that opened the way for you to my heart: I reverence the qualities, without accepting all the conclusions born of them,"—has a deeper insight than most of his fellows. He shows that he looks at things, and not at the traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel.

Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the "submission of love," but rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart, that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced. This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.

In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained.

The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate.

The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and treatment, deserves. We have only space to say, that, making every allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know, unbroken wilderness. Its author has not solved the problem,—he does not even understand all its conditions; but he is travelling in the direction of the true solution: and he offers us the rare, we had almost said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the discussion of the "Woman's-Rights question" an appreciable degree of sense, justice, and moral dignity.

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