Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864», страница 15

The course pursued by our Government seems to us to present a favorable contrast to that pursued by Great Britain. The United States has always manifested an anxiety to preserve amity. But the effort to preserve amity has been dignified. We have claimed to be treated as a friendly sovereign State. We have urged that the war should be regarded by foreign powers as the rightful exercise of a complete nationality to suppress insurrection. That the insurgents should be put upon a par with the Government, that they should enjoy the benefits of an established system, that they should have every right and every immunity as if the quarrel were between equal powers, has seemed to us a fallacy tinctured with deep prejudice. That feeling has been courteously, but firmly represented by our ministers. Since it pleased the European courts to proclaim their neutrality, we have borne the injustice temperately, and have confined our demands to our rights under that status. When the conduct of Great Britain has been of so irritating a nature as to produce universal indignation throughout the community, our statesmen have moderated the popular anger, and have remonstrated patiently as well as firmly. They have discerned more accurately than the multitude could do the evils of a twofold war, and yet have not avoided the danger, when to avoid it would have been disgraceful. Whatever may be the opinion of any as to Mr. Seward's political career, it is generally admitted that as Secretary of State he has accomplished the better thought of the nation. In his hands our foreign relations have been administered with prudence, with minute attention, and with great dignity. He has constantly maintained the idea of our national integrity, the full expectation of our final success, the continued efficacy of the Federal system, and our right to be considered none the less a compact nationality because the insurrection has taken the form of State secession. Our diplomatic intercourse has been confined to strictly diplomatic etiquette. No attempt has been made to justify, for the satisfaction of foreign courts, either the origin of the war, or the modes which have been adopted in its prosecution. It has not been deemed necessary to retaliate upon the Confederate agents who fill Europe with their tale of woe, by retorting upon them a reference to the unchristian practices of their soldiery. There has been no appeal to the moral sympathies of the Old World, by harping upon the enormities of slavery, and by announcing a crusade against it. Foreign communities have been left to the ordinary modes of information, to the press and the accounts of American and European orators, for the events which have been passing. It has contented us to let the record speak for itself, to attach infamy where it is due, to extort praise where praise is merited. We have not shown an ungenerous exultation at the embroilments of European politics, as diverting the hostile attention of enemies from our own affairs. "We are content," says Mr. Seward, in a despatch to Mr. Adams, "to rely upon the justice of our cause, and our own resources and ability to maintain it." We have not sought the aid of any power; we have only desired to sustain out admitted rights, and to be free from external interference.

It is surprising that Earl Russell should intimate his dissatisfaction that we have been less quick to offence from France than from England. The reason why we should not, in his opinion, feel so is the very reason why we should. He thinks, because our relations have been more intimate with England, because we speak the same language and inherit the same Anglo-Saxon genius, that therefore we should be more patient with her. But these circumstances seem to us to aggravate the treatment we have received at her hands. It has appeared to us unnatural that a nation so identified with us should mistrust us, and embrace every occasion to slight us where they could safely do so. The closer the tie, the deeper the wound. Besides, despite the common ground upon which England and America have stood, the past bequeaths us little grudge against France, much against England. France was the patron, England the bitter enemy, of our national infancy. Our arms have never closed with those of France; we have fought England twice, and virulently. Our diplomatic intercourse with England has been a series of misunderstandings; that with France has been, in general, harmonious. In later times, French essayists and journalists have been tolerant of our faults, and eloquent over our virtues; and not a little good feeling has been produced among our educated classes by the fairness and acuteness with which one of the greatest of modern Frenchmen, De Tocqueville, has considered our institutions. On the other hand, the English press and the English Parliament have been outspoken in their contempt of America; and the offence has been enhanced by the peculiarly insulting terms in which the feeling has been expressed. Such facts cannot but intensify our chagrin at finding that power which we had always regarded as our companion in the march of modern progress ill-disposed to sympathy now in the time of our trouble.

Mr. Seward has well expressed our attitude towards England in a few words:—"The whole case may be summed up in this. The United States claim, and they must continually claim, that in this war they are a whole sovereign nation, and entitled to the same respect, as such, that they accord to Great Britain. Great Britain does not treat them as such a sovereign, and hence all the evils that disturb their intercourse and endanger their friendship. Great Britain justifies her course, and perseveres. The United States do not admit the justification, and so they are obliged to complain and stand upon their guard. Those in either country who desire to see the two nations remain in this relation are not well-advised friends of either of them."

Our relations with France during the war have not been dissimilar to those with England, but have been less grating and more courteous. The same difficulties in regard to neutral rights have arisen; and the Imperial cabinet have seemed throughout favorable to the South. But the popular feeling, as far as it is patent, is decidedly more favorable to us than that of England; whatever has been said against us has been said considerately and temperately; and there has been at no period any imminent danger of war. The design of Napoleon to mediate was interpreted by the community as hostile and aggressive in its object. The President, we think justly, took what appears a more simple view,—that the Emperor miscalculated the actual condition of the country, and a mistaken desire to advise induced him to take the course he did. But those who know France best tell us that the Imperial opinion is far from being the index of the popular opinion, on any subject; and every evidence induces the conclusion that there is a strong undercurrent of sympathy for America throughout France.

Of all the foreign powers, Russia has been the only one which has given us cordial, unstinted encouragement. The sovereign, the most liberal and enlightened Czar who ever ascended the Muscovite throne, has expressed himself again and again the constant friend of the Union. It is agreeable to reflect that that vast empire, now far on its way to a liberal constitution, and hastened, instead of retarded by its august head, should lend the moral force of its unqualified good-will to the cause of American liberty. The noble words of Prince Gortschakoff to our envoy will be grateful to every loyal American heart:—"We desire above all things the maintenance of the American Union, as one indivisible nation. Russia has declared her position, and will maintain it. There will be proposals for intervention. Russia will refuse any invitation of the kind. She will occupy the same ground as at the beginning of the struggle. You may rely upon it, she will not change."

Our relations with other nations have not been important, and are quite similar to those with England and France. But, generally, the belief and hope in the final success of the Union have been steadily strengthening throughout Europe. The idea of our centralization has become more vivid; and far juster estimates of our character and institutions have been formed. When the war shall have been brought to a successful issue, we shall have afforded a noble proof of the full efficiency of a republican system over an intelligent people. Our own sinews will be compact, and our spirit will be infused into the aspirations of distant peoples. It may not be presumptuous to feel that our efforts are not for ourselves alone, but that they tell upon the fate of the earnest and hopeful millions who are striving for disenthralment in the Old World. Let us, then, expand our just ambition beyond the object of our national integrity; let us embrace within our own hopes the dawning fortunes of a free Italy and a free Hungary, of Poland liberated, of Greece regenerated. While nerving ourselves for the final struggle, let the sublime thought that our success will reach in its vast results the limits of the Christian world bring us redoubled strength. For if we should fall, the thrones of despots are fixed for centuries; if we triumph, in due time they will vanish and crumble to the dust. Those sovereigns who are wise will appear in the van, leading their people to the blessings of the liberty they have so long yearned for; those who throw themselves in the way will be overwhelmed by the resistless tide. To such an end we fight, and suffer, and wait; the greater the stake, the more fearful the ordeal; but Providence smiles upon those whose aim is freedom, and through danger guides to consummation.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge. By CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A., Professor of Modern History. Cambridge and London: Macmillan & Co.

Mr. Kingsley is a vivid and entertaining mediator between Carlyle and commonplace. In his younger days and writings he mediated between his master and commonplace radicalism,—representing the great Scot's antagonism to existing institutions, his sympathy with man as man, and his hope of a more human society, but representing it with sufficient admixture of vague fancy, Chartist catchword, weak passionateness, and spasmodic audacity, based, as such ever is, on moral cowardice. Of late he has gone to the other side of his master, and now mediates between him and the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Hanover family,—representing Carlyle's passionate craving for supereminent persons, his passionate abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike foreign to his master's spirit.

We prefer the second phase of the man. It belongs more properly to him. He is ambitious; and the rôle which he first assumed is one which ambition can only spoil. He has but a weak faith in principles, and flinches and flies off to "Prester John," or somewhere into the clouds, when at last principle and sentiment must either fly off or fairly take the stubborn British taurus by the horns. And in truth, his early creed was in part merely passionate and foolish, and with courage and disinterestedness to do more he would have professed less. His present position is better,—that is, sounder and sincerer. Better for him, because more limited and British, leaving him room still to toil at good work, and not calling upon him to break with Church and State, which he really has not the heart to do. As head of the hierarchy of beadles, he is an effective and even admirable man, pious, zealous, and reformatory; but institutions are more necessary to him than principles, and any attempt to plant himself purely on the latter places him in a false position.

Mr. Kingsley has fine gifts and good purposes. He has a rare power of realizing scenes and characters,—a power equally rare of presenting them in vivid, pictorial delineation. He must be a very engaging lecturer, imparting to his official labor an interest which does not always belong to labors of like kind.

For discoursing upon history he has important qualifications, which it would be uncandid not to acknowledge. Of these it is the first that he clings manfully, despite the tendencies of our time, to the human, rather than the extra-human stand-point. He respects personality; he treats of men, not of puppets; he is old-fashioned enough to believe that men may be moved from within no less than from without, and does not attempt, as Quinet has it, to abolish human history and add a chapter to natural history instead. Here, too, he follows Carlyle, but in a way which is highly to his credit. The enthusiasm for science which marks these later centuries breeds in many minds a powerful desire to establish "laws" for the history of man,—that is, to establish for man's history an invariable programme. To this end an effort is made to render all results in history dependent on a few simple and tangible conditions. The intrepid prosaic logic of Spencer, the discursive boldness of Buckle, the rigid dogmatism of Draper are all engaged in this endeavor. But, while eager to make history simple and orderly, they forget to make it human. There is an order and progress, perhaps, but an order and progress of what? Of men? Of human souls, self-moved? No, of sticks floating on a current, of straws blown by the wind! Men, according to this theory, are but ninepins in an alley which Nature sets up only to bowl them down again; and what avails it, if Nature makes improvement and learns to set them up better and better? The triumphs are hers, not theirs. They are but ninepins, after all. Progress? Yes, indeed; but wooden progress, observe.

Mr. Kingsley recognizes human beings, and recognizes them heartily,—loves, hates, admires, despises; in fine, he deals with history not merely as a scientist or theorist, but first of all as a man. There are those who will think this weak. They are superior to this partiality of man for himself, they! They would be ashamed not to sink the man in the savant. But Mr. Kingsley refuses to dehumanize himself in order to become historian and philosopher. He does well.

Again, it is partly Mr. Kingsley's merit, and partly it expresses his limitation, that he is treating history more distinctively as a moralizer than any other noted writer of the time. He assumes in this respect the Hebraistic point of view, and looks out from it with an undoubting heartiness which in these days is really refreshing. He believes in the Old Testament, and doubts not that riches and honors are the rewards of right-doing. And in this, too, there is a vast deal of truth; and it is truly delightful to find one who affirms it, not with perfunctory drawl, but with hearty human zest, a little red in the face.

It adds to the color of Mr. Kingsley's pages, while detracting from his authority, that he is always and inevitably a partisan. He must have somebody to cry up and somebody to cry down. In "Sir Amyas Leigh," his hatred of the Spanish and admiration of the English were like those of a man who had suffered intolerable wrongs from the one and received invaluable rescue from the other. The same element appears powerfully in the volume above named. The Teuton stands for all that is best, and the Roman for all that is worst in humanity. He makes no secret, indeed, of his deliberate belief that the whole future of the human race depends upon the Teutonic family. Deliberate, we say; but in truth Mr. Kingsley is little capable of believing anything deliberately. He is always precipitate. His opinions have the force which can be given them by warm espousal, vivid expression, a certain desire to be fair, and a constant appeal to the moral nature of man; but the impression of hasty and heated partisanship goes with them always, and two words from a broad and balanced judgment might overturn many a chapter of this red-hot advocacy.

The present volume derives an interest for Americans from its relation to our great contest. Mr. Kingsley has been represented as intensely hostile to the North, and as using all his endeavor to infect his pupils with his opinions. These lectures, however, hardly sustain such representations. He is, indeed, anti-democratic in a high degree. He is so as a disciple of Carlyle, as a prosperous Englishman, not destitute of flunkyism, and also as a man whose very best power is that of passionately admiring individual greatness. He is a believer in natural aristocracy, in the British nobility, and in Carlyle; and democracy could, of course, find small place in his creed. Hence he has a sentimental sympathy with the South, and once in a foot-note speaks of "the Southern gentleman" in a maudlin way. There is also another passage in which he makes the South stand for the Teuton, whom he worships, and the North for the Roman, whom he abhors. Yet this very passage occurs in connection with a denunciation of deserved doom upon the Southern Confederacy. He had been describing the last great battle of the Eastern Goths, after which they literally disappeared from history. And the reason of their defeat and destruction, he avers, was simply this, that they were a slaveholding aristocracy. As such they must perish; the earth, he declares, will not and cannot afford them a dwelling-place. Indeed, he repeatedly lays it down as a law of history that slaveholding aristocracies must go down before the progress of the world, and must go down in blood.

The Small House at Allington. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. New York: Harper & Brothers.

This is probably the best of Mr. Trollope's numerous works. It is by no means different in kind from its predecessors; for it stands in the path struck out by "The Warden" ten years ago. But it is better, inasmuch as it is later; that is, it is by ten years better than "The Warden," and by four years better than "Framley Parsonage." Mr. Trollope's course has been very even,—too even, almost, to be called brilliant; for success has become almost monotonous with him. His first novel was a triumph, after its kind; and a list of his subsequent works would be but a record of repeated triumphs. He has closely adhered to the method which he found so serviceable at first; and although it is not for the general critic to say whether he has felt temptations to turn aside, we may be sure, in view of his unbroken popularity, that he has either been very happy or very wise. His works, as they stand, are probably the exact measure of his strength.

We do not mean that he has exhausted his strength. It seems to be the prime quality of such a genius as Mr. Trollope's that it is exempt from accident,—that it accumulates, rather than loses force with age. Mr. Trollope's work is simple observation. He is secure, therefore, as long as he retains this faculty. And his observation is the more efficient that it is hampered by no concomitant purpose, rooted to no underlying beliefs or desires. It is firmly anchored, but above-ground. We have often heard Mr. Trollope compared with Thackeray,—but never without resenting the comparison. In no point are they more dissimilar than in the above. Thackeray is a moralist, a satirist; he tells his story for its lesson: whereas Mr. Trollope tells his story wholly for its own sake. Thackeray is almost as much a preacher as he is a novelist; while Mr. Trollope is the latter simply. Both writers are humorists, which seems to be the inevitable mood of all shrewd observers; and both incline to what is called quiet humor. But we know that there are many kinds of laughter. Think of the different kinds of humorists we find in Shakspeare's comedies. Mr. Trollope's merriment is evoked wholly by the actual presence of an oddity; and Thackeray's, although it be, by the way, abundantly sympathetic with superficial comedy, by its existence, by its history, by some shadow it casts. Of course all humorists have an immense common fund. When Cradell, in the present tale, talks about Mrs. Lupex's fine torso, we are reminded both of Thackeray and Dickens. But when the Squire, coming down to the Small House to discuss his niece's marriage, just avoids a quarrel with his sister about the propriety of early fires, we acknowledge, that, as it stands, the trait belongs to Trollope alone. Dickens would have eschewed it, and Thackeray would have expanded it. The same remark applies to their pathos. With Trollope we weep, if it so happen we can, for a given shame or wrong. Our sympathy in the work before us is for the jilted Lily Dale, our indignation for her false lover. But our compassion for Amelia Osborne and Colonel Newcome goes to the whole race of the oppressed.

Mr. Trollope's greatest value we take to be that he is so purely a novelist. The chief requisite for writing a novel in the present age seems to be that the writer should be everything else. It implies that the story-telling gift is very well in its way, but that the inner substance of a tale must repose on some direct professional experience. This fashion is of very recent date. Formerly the novelist had no personality; he was a simple chronicler; his accidental stand-point was as impertinent as the painter's attitude before his canvas. But now the main question lies in the pose, not of the model, but of the artist. It will fare ill with the second-rate writer of fiction, unless he can give conclusive proof that he is well qualified in certain practical functions. And the public is very vigilant on this point. It has become wonderfully acute in discriminating true and false lore. The critic's office is gradually reduced to a search for inaccuracies. We do not stop to weigh these truths; we merely indicate them. But we confess, that, if Mr. Trollope is somewhat dear to us, it is because they are not true of him. The central purpose of a work of fiction is assuredly the portrayal of human passions. To this principle Mr. Trollope steadfastly adheres,—how consciously, how wilfully, we know not,—but with a constancy which is almost a proof of conviction, and a degree of success which lends great force to his example. The interest of the work before us is emphatically a moral interest: it is a story of feeling, the narrative of certain feelings.

Mr. Troliope's tales give us a very sound sense of their reality. It may seem paradoxical to attribute this to the narrowness of the author's imagination; but we cannot help doing so. On reflection, we shall see that it is not so much persons as events that Mr. Trollope aims at depicting, not so much characters as scenes. His pictures are real, on the whole. Their reality, we take it, is owing to the happy balance of the writer's judgment and his invention. Had his invention been a little more tinged with fancy, it is probable that he would have known certain temptations of which he appears to be ignorant. Even should he have successfully resisted them, the struggle, the contest, the necessity of choice would have robbed his manner of that easy self-sufficiency which is one of its greatest charms. Had he succumbed, he would often have fallen away from sober fidelity to Nature. As the matter stands, his great felicity is that he never goes beyond his depth,—and this, not so much from fear, as from ignorance. His insight is anything but profound. He has no suspicion of deeper waters. Through the whole course of the present story, he never attempts to fathom Crosbie's feelings, to retrace his motives, to refine upon his character. Mr. Trollope has learned much in what is called the realist school; but he has not taken lessons in psychology. Even while looking into Crosbie's heart, we never lose sight of Courcy Castle, of his Club, of his London life; we cross the threshold of his inner being, we knock at the door of his soul, but we remain within call of Lily Dale and the Lady Alexandrina. We never see Crosbie the man, but always Crosbie the gentleman, the Government clerk. We feel at times as if we had a right to know him better,—to know him at least as well as he knew himself. It is significant of Mr. Trollope's temperament—a temperament, as it seems to us, eminently English—that he can have told such a story with so little preoccupation with certain spiritual questions. It is evident that this spiritual reticence, if we may so term it, is not a parti pris; for no fixed principle, save perhaps the one hinted at above, is apparent in the book. It belongs to a species of single-sightedness, by which Mr. Trollope, in common with his countrymen, is largely characterized,—an indifference to secondary considerations, an abstinence from sidelong glances. It is akin to an intense literalness of perception, of which we might find an example on every page Mr. Trollope has written. He is conscious of seeing the surface of things so clearly, perhaps, that he deems himself exempt from all profounder obligations. To describe accurately what he sees is a point of conscience with him. In these matters an omission is almost a crime. We remember an instance somewhat to the purpose. After describing Mrs. Dale's tea-party at length, in the beginning of the book, he wanders off with Crosbie and his sweetheart on a moonlight-stroll, and so interests us in the feelings of the young couple, and in Crosbie's plans and promises for the future, (which we begin faintly to foresee,) that we have forgotten all about the party. And, indeed, how could the story of the party end better than by gently passing out of the reader's mind, superseded by a stronger interest, to which it is merely accessory? But such is not the author's view of the case. Dropping Crosbie, Lilian, and the more serious objects of our recent concern, he begins a new line and ends his chapter thus:—"After that they all went to bed." It recalls the manner of "Harry and Lucy," friends of our childhood.

But to return to our starting-point,—in "The Small House at Allington" Mr. Trollope has outdone his previous efforts. He has used his best gifts in unwonted fulness. Never before has he described young ladies and the loves of young ladies in so charming and so natural a fashion. Never before has he reproduced so faithfully—to say no more—certain phases of the life and conversation of the youth of the other sex. Never before has he caught so accurately the speech of our daily feelings, plots, and passions. He has a habit of writing which is almost a style; its principal charm is a certain tendency to quaintness; its principal defect is an excess of words. But we suspect this manner makes easy writing; in Mr. Trollope's books it certainly makes very easy reading.

A Class-Book of Chemistry; in which the Latest Facts and Principles of the Science are explained and applied to the Arts of Life and the Phenomena of Nature. A New Edition, entirely rewritten. By EDWARD L. YOUMANS, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Though Science has been often vaguely supposed to be something generally distinct from ordinary knowledge, yet the slightest consideration will suffice to show us that this is not the case. Scientific knowledge is only a highly developed form of the common information of ordinary minds. The specific attribute by which it is distinguished from the latter is quantitative prevision. Mere prevision is not peculiar to science. When the school-boy throws a stone into the air, he can predict its fall as certainly as the astronomer can predict the recurrence of an eclipse; but his prevision, though certain, is rude and indefinite: though he can foretell the kind of effect which will follow the given mechanical impulse, yet the quantity of effect—the height to which the stone will ascend, and the rapidity with which it will fall—is something utterly beyond his ken. The servant-girl has no need of chemistry to teach her, that, when the match is applied, the fire will burn and smoke ascend the chimney; but she is far from being able to predict the proportional weights of oxygen and carbon which will unite, the volume of the gases which are to be given off, or the intensity of the radiation which is to warm the room: her prevision is qualitative, not quantitative, in its character. But when Galileo discovers the increment of the velocity of falling bodies, and when Dalton and De Morveau discover the exact proportions in which chemical union takes place, it is evident that knowledge has advanced from a rudely qualitative to an accurately quantitative stage; and it does not admit of dispute that the progress of science is thus a progress from the indefinite to the definite.

From the point of view here taken it would appear that during the present century no science has made such rapid and unprecedented strides as Chemistry; and its progress becomes all the more striking, when we consider the state of the science previous to the French Revolution. For centuries nothing had been done in it whatever. Besides the commonest previsions of every-day life, the ancients knew scarcely anything either of chemistry or physics, except that amber possessed attractive properties. The discovery of the strong acids by the Arabs Giafar and Rhazes, and of phosphorus by Bechil, are almost the only landmarks in the history of the science, until the discovery of oxygen and the destruction of the phlogistic theory by Priestley and Lavoisier, together with the introduction of the balance and the thermometer into the laboratory, rendered quantitative experiments possible. Since then its progress has been unexampled. The law of definite proportions, not long since disputed or unwillingly accepted, has been proved to hold even among organic compounds. A nomenclature has been invented and perfected, such as no other science can boast of, whether we consider the extent to which it facilitates practical operations, or its logical value as a means of mental discipline. Chemistry has also interacted with the different branches of physics, giving us the voltaic battery, the telegraph, and the wonderful results of spectrum-analysis. On the other hand, it has analyzed the proximate constituents of animal and vegetal structures, and has even gone far toward determining some of the conditions of organic existence; while every one of the arts, whether æsthetic, therapeutic, or industrial, has received from it many and important suggestions.